College, Theoretically

General life update

2012-01-22T00:19:00.001-05:00

Sorry for the infrequent posts lately, but, well, I'm lazy. However, a few things of note have happened lately:

1. I'm in Seattle - My long saga of finding a job has (hopefully) ended for a while as I got an offer from Amazon to work for them as a Software Development Engineer. I moved to Seattle this past week and I start work on Monday.

2. My leg is (healing from being) fractured - In my distance build-up while training for a half-marathon last fall, I got a stress fracture in my leg (hence the abrupt halt in the Twitter updates about my running). I was in a brace for a few weeks and on Monday get to start running (small amounts, sticking to a schedule) again.

That's about it for now, on the news-of-my-life front. More will I'm sure come as I settle into place up here in Washington.

New Year's Resolutions

2012-01-21T18:30:00.000-05:00

First, last year's resolutions:

1. Eat pie - definitely succeeded.
2. Run 365 miles, including in the Charlottesville 10-miler - Success. I ran the ten miler, and in November hit the 365 mile mark as I crossed the finish line in the Richmond Half-Marathon. I did a few miles after that but wasn't able to do much as I found out a short while later that I have a stress fracture in my leg, and won't be able to run until mid-February (and even then, much less than I had been).
3. Lose weight to 160 lbs. - Ha. Not a chance.
4. Test in Myo Sim - I tested for my 3rd degree black belt in kendo, and passed.
5. Be more organized - Hard to say.
6. Build stuff - I built a bed, as previously mentioned, and completely reassembled my bike.
7. Climb stuff - I did a bit, but nowhere near enough.
8. Work on learning an instrument - I worked a bit on guitar but not enough to get much better.
9. Work on learning a language - Nope. I worked a bit on my Spanish in the spring but since then, nothing.
10. Be a better person - Again, definitely not my place to judge whether or not this was successful.

My resolutions for the upcoming year:
1. Eat pie - as always.
2. Run 365 miles, including the Tough Mudder and the GORUCK Challenge - I've shown I can run this far, but a) I won't be able to start until mid-February and b) I want to put more of a focus on endurance runs and overall strength, hence the non-traditional runs I've set as my goals.
3. Lose weight - If I can lose any weight at all this year, it'll be an improvement from previous ones. That said, if I can gain muscle while staying the same weight, that'd be fine, too.
4. Climb more - There are three climbing gyms convenient to where I'll be living and working, and as I don't currently have kendo filling up evenings, I have no excuse not to go. I was going to sign up for a membership today but the one I was going to join was closed today due to snow.
5. Do more photography - I did a bunch back in 2009 with the trip to Vietnam and Europe but it's fallen off a lot since then. I want to change that.
6. Stay organized - I just moved into an apartment in Seattle (post explaining everything about that to come) and I'll be living here for at least the next six months. It's currently not messy (even I have trouble getting a place cluttered in a few days) and I want to keep it that way.
7. Write - I haven't really written fiction in a few years now, and I'd like to give it a shot again.
8. Draw - I always feel like I'm right at the border of being happy with how I draw, and I want to practice enough to get over that hurdle and into the range of art that's at least good enough for me.
9. Get involved in some form of community service - In elementary - high school I had Boy Scouts, and then in college I (eventually) got involved in APO. Now I'm out in Seattle and I want to find some way to get involved in service. Not sure exactly what yet, but something.
10. Be a better person - partly a cop-out because I had trouble coming up with my usual ten, but also something I'll always think I need work on.

Knife

2011-11-17T23:29:00.000-05:00

Here's the knife I made for my brother. It's for karate, so it's blunt (both blade and tip), but apart from that and the lack of heat-treating (not very necessary when no edge-holding is required) it's made exactly like a sharp knife would be. The blade is 1095 high-carbon steel, and the handle is African Blackwood. It took about eight hours to make and another six to eight hours to polish, but the polishing is easy and was primarily done while watching TV or reading.

There are a couple things I wish I could've done better with this. For one, there are still a few filing scratches visible on the blade. I should've spent more time with rough sandpaper when polishing it. In addition, I countersunk the holes for the bolster pins a bit too much, leaving small divots around the edge, and I used a pointed punch on the bolster pins when it turned out to not be necessary, so there are tiny holes in the middle. I wish there were a bit more blade definition, but that's more just aesthetic preference.

I've got another shipment of knife materials coming tomorrow (wood and synthetic scales for two handles and enough metal for seven blades), so hopefully I'll get a chance over the weekend to get started on another one.

Recent stuff

2011-11-15T19:25:00.000-05:00

Sorry about the lack of a post in October, but I forgot. It happens.

Anyway, a bit of interesting stuff has happened lately.
1. Running a half-marathon: This past weekend I ran the McDonalds Half-Marathon in Richmond (putting me at exactly 365 miles on the year). I was aiming somewhat optimistically for a time of 2 hours, but due to the complete lack of hills (compared to my normal running routes, at least) I managed to finish it in 1:55:10, and like the Charlottesville Ten Miler I ran the second part faster than the first (8:54 a mile for the first 10k, 8:41 a mile for the rest). I need to do more practice at these distances so I have a better idea of what pace I can handle.

2. Looking for a job: Due to budget cuts at the place I was going to work, I no longer have a job lined up once I finish with the start-up in a few weeks. I'm working on fixing that. I've applied a couple places, so hopefully I'll get something.

3. Knife making: Back in September I decided to make a knife for my brother for his birthday, as he was in need of one for karate and hadn't had much luck finding a suitable one. I'd made one or two really crude ones in high school and college, but nothing fancy or nice-looking, and nothing with a design as specific and tight as this one needed. It ended up turning out much better than expected (I'll post pictures of it once I get a chance to take them later this week) and now a handful of other people want them, as well, so that'll be my project for December after I'm done with my current software job.

Stuff has actually happened this month!

2011-09-26T22:49:00.001-04:00

So, unlike the rather boring couple months since my two-wheeled trek to the Pacific ended abruptly, stuff has actually happened this month.

-Job? Kinda? I have something resembling a job now. I'm currently working for a start-up while waiting to find out if I have a job with an established company. I'm working on an app for Android devices. Probably shouldn't say much more than that. I'm not getting paid yet (it's a pre-funding start-up), which is unfortunate, but it also has the benefit that there's no office, so I can work from my couch. It's pretty interesting stuff. It's giving me a chance to learn more about mobile development, which is something I've been meaning to learn, and it's interesting to see the inner workings of a fledgling company, instead of just being buried in code and nothing else.

-Moving to NoVa: I've recently moved up to Northern Virginia, due to that whole job thing. I'm living with a couple other guys from APO, which is working out pretty well. My room is a bit tiny (8'10" x 9'2"), but at least it's letting me practice my creative furniture building.

-Creative furniture building: Due to the miniscule size of my room, I'm having to conserve and double-use space. In order to fit both a bed (which is kinda a necessity) and a couch (which is definitely a necessity) into my room, I built a loft bed so they take up the same area of floor space. However, I was bored back in August/early September before starting work, so I decided to make it without the use of anything other than wood. This meant no nails, screws, glue, or even lashings, and instead a lot of chiseled notches for various pieces of wood to slot through, with a few pegs to hold the diagonal braces on. Somehow, it actually worked, and I think it's even sturdier and more stable than the loft bed in my room at home, despite initial skepticism on the part of all involved (that is, me and my dad). As an added bonus, the design actually incorporates my required couch as one of its braces. I'll post pictures once I take them tomorrow, but currently it's sitting nicely in my room ready to be slept in. And, with the exception of moving the couch into place, I was able to assemble it entirely by myself (Zak, thanks for the help with the couch).

-Other fun stuff: One nice advantage of working as opposed to school is that I don't have homework for the weekends (although I've been putting in a few hours of work out of my own curiosity about the project and not because I have to). This means that I have the time to do fun stuff, such as this weekend when I went climbing on Saturday (at a gym, as opposed to outside, but it was still quite fun) and scuba diving on Sunday (I'm now advanced open-water certified by NAUI). Next weekend will probably be climbing again on Saturday, and then I don't know about Sunday. Something fun, hopefully. In addition, I've been able to run most evenings after work, which is always good.

Now, though, sleep.

Obligatory August post

2011-08-31T17:36:00.000-04:00

Too many of these posts are obligatory end-of-the-month ones. Hopefully that'll change once I'm actually doing interesting stuff.
On the topic of doing interesting stuff, that'll hopefully actually start happening soon. More details once I have more details.
As for what I've been doing for the past month, the first little bit was finishing up at CTY, followed by coming home and attempting to get out of Charlottesville. It looks like that'll be happening in the coming week. I'm currently about to start one job in the dead space while waiting to find out if I have a different job.
As the Twitter sidebar thingy probably shows, I've been trying to do more running lately. I set a resolution to run 365 miles this year, and just yesterday I got back up to having done an average of a mile a day. Today I ran more and gave myself a week's buffer, but my ankle isn't happy with me so I'll probably take a few days off.

That's it for now, but expect more frequent posts once I actually have things about which to write.

Obligatory July Post

2011-07-31T22:04:00.003-04:00

So it's the last day of July and I realized that because of CTY I hadn't yet posted anything on here. It's always busy and there's so much fun stuff going on that I don't have much time for outside communication.
A good portion of what I've had to do the past few weeks (aside from work for CTY) was figuring out what I'd be doing in the fall. I'd previously accepted an offer from Datran Media, an internet analytics firm in Reston, Virginia. I'd chosen them primarily because of the location: I wanted to get out of Charlottesville for a change of scenery, but I still wanted to be on the east coast.
However, in June I was told that they were moving from Reston to Austin, Texas. I've heard wonderful things about Austin, but I didn't particularly feel like moving there. I started looking around for a new job, and ended up getting offers for a few interviews. I was only able to do one of them due to being away at CTY, an interview with SAIC in Bethesda, Maryland, but it went well and I got the job. Assuming I can get the requisite security clearance, I'll be starting work there in September.
This upcoming week is the last one of CTY, and it's weird to think that it'll be my last summer here for a while. Having a real job means I probably won't be able to come back until I'm in grad school, which won't be for at least a few years. I've been at CTY in some way, either as a student or a TA, for 8 of the last 9 years and it feels strange to be leaving that.
The next month will be spent finding an apartment up in North Bethesda/southern Rockville, or somewhere in that vicinity, and preparing to permanently move for the first time in my life. I've moved to a dorm plenty of times, but I've never moved anywhere to stay for an indeterminate time frame.
Anyway, time to get back to work for class.

Well, I'm home

2011-06-18T03:12:00.001-04:00

Sorry for the lack of updates during the last part of my trip, but after leaving Lone Pine everything started happening far too quickly, and so I didn't really get a good chance to sit down and write without the feeling that I'd be doing everything a disservice without knowing how the current episode was going to play out. Now, though, I know how it all ends (admittedly, right now I don't, as I'm writing this the night before arriving home, but, well, at this point, my vehicle had better not break down again or else, well, that'd be very, very bad).
So, where I left off: I'd just arrived in Lone Pine. My first two days in Lone Pine were spent sleeping in and gathering supplies. I needed food for my hike, albeit not much, and I decided I wanted that food to have the option of being hot, so I got a tiny camping stove (this has the added benefit of being able to quickly melt snow into drinking water). I also needed to pick up a bear canister, due to their habit of eating food brought by campers (and, on quite rare occasions, the campers themselves), and I needed to get my permit from the ranger station in town. All of this took only a very short while, and the rest of the time was largely spent reading and then fixing the muffler on the bike, as it'd gotten further damaged.
Quick note as to the construction of the muffler system on a Nighthawk: It's a two-cylinder engine, and it's got two mufflers. They emerge at the top front of the engine, one on either side, and then curl down the front and then beneath the bottom of the engine, just off to the sides, and continue on back to the rear of the bike. The mufflers themselves don't start until behind the engine; everything in front of that is just pipe directing gases. Beneath the engine a pipe goes across between the two mufflers, to redirect the flow in case either one gets blocked at the end (at least, that's what I think its purpose is). Overall, the system (or at least the part of it with which I was concerned) is a capital H shape.
The previous damage had been that one of the connection points between the pipe, muffler, and bypass pipe had completely failed – each part was broken off from each other, so there were three bare pipe endings just sort of sitting there in space with a small gap between them. Fixing such a junction is hard, because there's no easy way to wrap anything around it and get a perfectly opposing anchor point.
Sometime after the accident in Utah but before arriving in Lone Pine, the bypass pipe had fallen off, leaving both mufflers with holes. Based on the gas mileage (good on one tank and then bad the next), I think it happened somewhere either shortly before or in Death Valley. Despite the fact that, technically speaking, this problem was worse, two holes instead of one, it was significantly easier to fix – the holes were bigger, and there were two, but by hose-clamping pieces of sheet metal around the pipes, they were as good as new (minus the lack of the bypass, meaning I had to make sure no hooligans stuck potatoes or anything like that in the mufflers). It was eerie how quiet the bike was – coasting back from Whitney with the engine idling (due to there being a mile of elevation loss in 13 miles of road, I only needed to actually use the engine at the very end), I couldn't hear it over the wind.
Anyway, motorcycle fixing accomplished, and reading accomplished, as well (I finished The Lost City of Z, a good book about the Amazonian explorer Percy Fawcett), it was time for Mt. Whitney.
I decided before starting that 'd hike to Trail Camp and no further. Trail Camp is at 12,000 feet, six miles up the trail from the 8,000 foot or so trailhead. It's the last campsite before the summit, which is at a bit over ten miles along the trail, and at an elevation of 14,497.61 feet (although on a summit that's probably covered in dirt and gravel, I don't know how they measure the elevation to an accuracy of a hundredth of a foot or, roughly, the thickness of a nickel). It's also the last spot that was reachable (safely and sanely, even by my distorted standards of each) without an ice ax (pretty self explanatory) and crampons (spikes you strap onto your feet). I don't have either of those, and I decided to not rent them as a way of forcing myself to stop at that point.
I left town shortly before eight and arrived in Whitney Portal, the base of the trail, at shortly after eight. There isn't anything there except a store selling last-minute essentials, which in my case meant a map (I thought I had sent mine home, although I later found it at the very bottom of my motorcycle dashboard bag) and breakfast. I'd read on the online forums about the delicious pancakes made by the store, so I ordered one of those. I thought it odd that the menu listed pancake, singular, and not pancakes, but once it was prepared I understood: the singular pancake was probably sixteen or eighteen inches in diameter and in the middle approaching an inch thick, and when draped across two paper plates only slightly overlapped it still hung off both sides (long-ways, of course). I ate a small amount of it and saved the rest in a ziploc bag for later (although I never did end up finishing it).
Breakfast and map acquired, I set out up the trail. The first part wasn't that much different from trails in the Blue Ridge – the section I hiked had a gain of 4,000 feet over six miles, which isn't that much different of a grade from something like Humpback Rocks (although, for comparison, this hike started at roughly 2,500 feet above Virginia's highest point, Mt. Rogers, which is about 5,500 feet at the top).
The first part of the trail was, I'd say, even easier than Humpback – the slope was shallower due to the large number of switchbacks (only around two dozen, though – one late section of the trail, past Trail Camp so not a section I hiked, is called the 99 Switchbacks, but even that's an understatement, as it's actually somewhere in the 140s). That stretched about two and a half miles up to Lone Pine Lake, the point at which the permit became necessary (although the ranger who's supposed to check them wasn't there).
There had only been a few spots before the lake where the trail had snow, but past the lake it was almost non-stop. The first section was a winding trail through rocks and snow to get up to the first main campground, Outpost Camp, at three and a half miles along the trail. I'm not sure how good of a campground this actually is, as it seemed to be not much more than a shrub-filled swamp with a few dry spots at the west end, but there were tents there, so I suppose it counts.
I chatted briefly with the ranger, who was walking the trail instead of just waiting at Lone Pine. He didn't check my permit.
From this point on, it was entirely snowy, icy slopes. Immediately out of the campsite, the trail was a series of switchbacks, but because of the snow, the only viable route was straight up, cutting across all of them (it was tough to tell that it was even supposed to be switchbacks). This point led to a trail over some large rocks, at the end of which was a long, tall slope of snow, periodically interrupted by massive boulders. It was less intimidating than the slope up to the summit of Mt. Elbert, primarily because I'd already climbed Elbert and thus knew that it was doable, even by someone inexperienced like me, but the fact that I was carrying 57 pounds on my back (they have a scale at the trailhead) certainly added a bit of difficulty.
This section was about a mile long, gently tapering off at the top until where it reached Trail Camp, and it took me about an hour. A relatively sizable lake lies right to the side of the trail, and it was barely visible, just discolored ice.
Overall, it took me about six hours to make it the six miles to Trail Camp, which is, somehow, faster than the predicted pace. The rule I've heard is to assume an hour for each two miles and an hour for each thousand feet of elevation gain, but given that I knew I only had to do six miles and not the full ten and change to the top, I could move a bit faster.
Just as I was walking into Trail Camp, it began to snow. Not terribly heavily, but enough that by whenever in the night it stopped, it had left a noticeable amount, maybe a quarter inch or so, on previously bare surfaces.
At Trail Camp I found a spot surrounded by some improvised rock wall and began to set up my tent inside it, but there weren't spots to properly secure the stakes, so I had to move to slightly more exposed ground twenty or thirty feet away. I left my stuff here and climbed up onto a nearby slope (the southern face of Woten's Throne, a big rock formation towering a few hundred feet over the camp) to look for a better spot, either on the slope or visible below, but I couldn't find one. Upon returning to boulders next to the trail, it took me a good ten minutes to find where I'd left my things, despite my things including two bright red poles stuck vertically in the ground in, as I said, an exposed area.
Note to non-mountain-people: When I talk of a landscape with boulders, you might initially think of a field with a big rock sitting in it. This isn't quite what it's like. Imagine taking a handful of dirt and a handful of gravel, mixing them together quite well, shaking it all up, and then pouring this into a bowl (and then, of course, make everything a few hundred times bigger). That surface, with dirt and buried stones all intermixed so that there are flat spots of dirt, mounds of stones, and plenty of places where there's a mixture of the two intermingled, is what it's like.
Anyway, that's where I camped. I had everything set up by around five, and after cooking dinner and doing a bit of clean-up from that, it was six. I was tired from lugging myself and a third of my body weight all the way up to the camp, but I knew if I went to sleep right then I'd wake up around 3 am. Had I been continuing to the summit in the morning, that'd have been perfect, but as I was just hiking down, I didn't particularly want to wake up before sunrise. I read the introduction to Tom Sawyer, and then lay there for a while thinking my usual middle-of-nature philosophizing while listening to the snow land on the tent. It was somewhere in the twenties outside, or would get there overnight, but my sleeping bag (a zero-degree mummy bag) worked just fine at keeping my warm.
For someone who enjoys camping, I actually sleep really badly in tents. Not sure why. The fact that I never carry a pillow probably plays a role, but I also like to splay out a lot when I sleep, and sleeping bags and narrow sleeping mats atop cold, rocky ground really don't mesh with that desire. Anyway, despite a rather sleepless night, the morning came. I slept enough, somewhere between three and six hours, I'd guess, after lying there for between nine and twelve. I'm quite good at keeping myself entertained with just my thoughts (anyone who's gone on a long-distance motorcycle trip probably is, or else the hours with nothing to distract you, not even music to listen to, just the road occupying a bit of your brain and your body fully constrained by the task, would drive you mad) so it didn't bother me.
I awoke in the morning to find that the snow had stopped. My portable weather radio thingy with built-in thermometer told me that the current temperature was 27 degrees, and that was inside my tent, so outside was probably a degree or two colder. Keep in mind, if you've lost track of the date in this narrative, that this was the morning of June 8th.
I got up and explored a bit more up on Woten's Throne, but I didn't get very high up before I didn't feel safe climbing on the icy rock. When I go back to climb Whitney in a warmer month I'll take chalk and climbing shoes and go to the top. Technically speaking it isn't that tough, certainly not worse than a 5.7, and there's probably a route up that isn't even a 5. Still, more than I wanted to do that morning, improperly prepared, carrying a camera case.
I packed up camp and headed down. No bears had attempted to get into my bear canister, luckily. Even though they're kinda designed for that sort of thing, I think I might have a hard time getting my deposit back on the rental if it had massive claw and teeth marks in it.
There's a small lake at Trail Camp (it's more of a pond, but the map calls it a lake). Without a map, you would've had absolutely no way of knowing about it, due to the snow. I hope the ice is thick enough to support a person's weight, but I certainly didn't search it out to find out. On the way down, the new snow had also made the significantly larger lake below Trail Camp (I think it's called Consultation Lake, but I could be wrong, however shocking that might sound) completely invisible. It just looked like a flat, surprisingly level and rock-free meadow.
I took two wrong turns on the way down. Neither was really an issue. The first took me down a steep snow- and ice-covered slope instead of down the switchbacks above Outpost Camp, but it was interesting, it gave me a chance to do a bit of glissading, and I got to see the remains of my first natural avalanche (as opposed to the tiny one I prompted on Wheeler Peak). It was different than the Wheeler one, anyway: whereas that was nothing but loose snow, a liquid flow of it, this one seemed to have been more a rockslide of blocks of ice and packed snow, far less fluid and probably less graceful but more intimidating. Either way, it seems to have happened during the night, so probably no one saw it to tell one way or the other.
Below the avalanche (below as in farther down the slope, not below as in buried by) was Outpost Camp. On the way up I had climbed to one rock overlooking the Camp, to get a good view of it, and on the way back I did so again, but with a different rock. From this rock I slid down to another and then planned to make my way across the slope to the far end of the camp.
One important fact to realize is that, because of the snow the previous night, the ground was four layers: there was the ground itself, rock and dirt; there was the underlying dense snowmelt from the winter, there was the crust of ice atop this that I discussed in my explanation of postholing (which luckily only happened once or twice on this hike, with no ill consequences), and there was that night's snow. This made getting a good foothold difficult, if the slope was too steep: the snow atop ice was quite slippery, and due to the large discrepancy between daytime and nighttime temperatures the ice crust was thick. It's these conditions that make an ice ax useful, as you can easily drive its serrated pick through the ice to get a hold if you start to fall. Getting through any other way is difficult, and can't really be counted on in a time of need.
However, I was rather in that time of need. Because I'd reached my spot by sliding down a slope too steep to walk, just retracing my path wasn't possible. Likewise, going straight down wasn't possible, because I had no way to self-arrest (slow my speed of descent) without an ice ax and it was too far, and onto too uneven a pile of rocks, to slide. I had to continue on sideways, but I could barely stand on the slope, even after driving the edges of my boots into the snow/ice as far as possible (these are the conditions that make crampons useful).
If I had been forced to go down, I probably could've made it. I would've tied as long a cord to my pack as I could've managed and slid that down first, and then just aimed for the best spot and prepared for the impact at the bottom. However, I did have one tool, or pair of tools, that might be useful, and those were my hiking poles, which, however silly I thought them before this trip, have actually proven to be quite the lucky addition to my gear.
I was, mostly, able to drive them through the ice crust, due to their relatively sharp steel tips (not sharp, per se, but small, about the size of a ball-point pen tip, so capable of generating great pressure). About two-thirds of the time I could get them all the way through and also into the couple feet of snow below, but other times I could only get them partly through, embedded a few inches. When they went all the way through they provided a perfectly stable handgrip, but when they went only partway in, they held if I had my feet planted and were iffy otherwise.
By leapfrogging these over each other a foot or two at a time, I was able to slide over to the next rock pile, and from there to the final one at the end of the slope overlooking the camp. From there I could reach the proper trail again, and continue down.
(I should clarify here that although the slope was too steep to walk across or control my slide down, it was by no means a vertical wall or anything approaching it. Taking into account the fact that people are terrible at judging slopes, it was probably 45 degrees. I'd guess it to be steeper but people normally vastly overestimate. Regardless, try turning an ice rink to the slope of a staircase and see how you can manage, even if it seems not that bad when thinking about it in the abstract of just 45 degrees.)
From here I made a similar poor choice of path when descending to Lone Pine Lake, but the snow here was easier to get a grip in and the ice was easier to pierce with the hiking poles, and I had more practice at this point. After Lone Pine Lake, there were only a few spots of trail left. It was just hiking the last few miles down the gravel trail through the trees, down the switchbacks, back to the trailhead, and then biking back into town. I had skipped breakfast because I didn't feel like cooking, so I went across the street from my motel and had one of Lone Pine's delectable veggie burgers. Seriously, that town has awesome veggie burgers. Every place I went (a whopping total of three, including the Whitney Portal Store but not counting the Subway) had them on the menu, and the two I tried were both delicious.
I packed everything up and mailed a second box home, making it so that, surprisingly enough, I actually had some empty space in my bags for the first time during the trip.
I decided at this point to change my plan. Well, I decided during my malaise in Leadville to change the plan after Whitney, but it wasn't until this point that I made my new plan: head out to the Pacific, specifically, Monterey, then ride down the Pacific Coast Highway to a bit north of LA before cutting east to Austin, Texas, due to suggestions from multiple friends, and then from there, home, through the south on some route that would intersect my old roommate's Bike And Build trip. I booked my places to stay through Austin, at two KOA campgrounds and then a motel in Austin itself (I was also spending one night along the coast, but that would be at a national park campground that didn't accept reservations). From Austin, then, it'd be another three days of riding, and then I'd be home.
Heading out of Lone Pine, the ride started out going pretty well. The chain on the bike had developed a bit of a habit of coming off the rear axle, doing so twice on the way to Lone Pine and then once shortly after leaving. It was probably due in part to the accident on Pike's Peak, as it happened then, and the accident in Utah certainly didn't help, either, as it happened there, as well. After this it was loose, so a bad combination of braking and shifting gears while moving at the right speed would knock it loose. Easy enough to fix, but annoying.
Well, about two-thirds of the way to Monterey, it came off again, and this time got stuck somehow such that I needed to remove one of the side panels near the engine in order to jiggle it around to get it back in place. Unfortunately, I didn't have the tools to do that, as I needed an 8mm socket and I only had a very cheap 8mm flat wrench. Luckily, after being stopped at the side of the road for upwards of an hour, a guy passing by stopped, and happened to have the right tools. However, even though it was temporarily fixed, the chain really needed either seriously tightened or replaced.
I managed to make it to Monterey, although about three hours later than planned, and due to that and weather conditions I bailed on the campground idea and instead opted for a motel. In the morning I took the bike to a repair place (morning #2 starting in a bike shop), and they replaced the chain, and suggested that I get the rear sprocket replaced as soon as possible, too, although they didn't have the proper one in stock.
In Monterey, while waiting on the bike repairs, I walked over to the ocean and dipped my fingers in the Pacific, about two weeks after swimming in the Atlantic.
As I was leaving Monterey, I noticed that the rear tire was showing serious wear. Specifically, the rubber in one spot had worn away far enough to expose the underlying fabric (rubber on its own is pretty strong, but the added reinforcement of fabric or metal embedded in the rubber makes it even stronger). This is, to put it mildly, not good, as that means there isn't much tire left, and when it's the drive tire on a motorcycle that's doing five hundred miles a day at 60 miles an hour, that's not going to last very long. Blowouts on cars suck. It can damage the rim and, if the conditions are bad, can jeopardize your control of the vehicle. Blowouts on motorcycles, especially at highway speeds, are many times worse, due to both the fact that it's one of two tires instead of one of four and the fact that while cars are inherently stable, with their default position being upright, motorcycles are not. If you just stop doing anything to a car, it'll drift to a stop eventually with no real issues. If you just stop managing a bike, for example, if your attentions drifts for a few seconds because your tire just burst, the bike loses balance, and that isn't good. Quite bad, in fact.
I was already on the famed Pacific Coast Highway, CA-1 along Big Sur, at this point, and I figured (correctly, there isn't any surprise disaster coming, at least not yet) that I had enough tire left to make it to San Luis Obispo at the south end of the desolate (human-civilization-wise) stretch of parkland.
The ride was beautiful. The winds at points were annoying, but that's the case with most roads, and given that this was right along the coast, it easily could've been a lot worse. The only problem I ran into was that I wanted to stop every few miles to visit the beach. I'll need to visit some other time when I have a week to see just that hundred-odd-mile stretch of road. Maybe I'll try it on a regular bicycle instead of a motorcycle.
Anyway, I made it to San Luis Obispo to the south, with just enough time to go by one of the motorcycle shops. They had the right tire in stock, but they didn't have time to install it that night. I said I'd be back in the morning and went off to find a motel.
I have a problem where I lose track of time like it's my job. When I'm doing something largely untethered like this trip, it's even worse, as I drift in both time and date. When you combine that with the fact that I don't know the schedules for random west-coast universities, you get the result that I had no idea it was Friday, and Cal Poly's graduation was the following morning in SLO. Finding an open room, okay, that actually wasn't difficult. Finding an open room for a price I was willing to pay, though, wasn't possible, so I had to go a town or two north and stay in a park service campground (which still cost as much as a cheap motel). When I got back into town the next morning, the size of the section of fabric wear on the tire had increased substantially, from maybe an inch long to four inches long, going through two separate fabric layers. Given that my next stretch took me across a few thousand miles of desert, it was a good thing I caught the problem when I did.
I got the new tire and I set out, headed east for the first time that trip. I had a reservation at a KOA in Blythe.
Here's a hint: I don't know if it applies to everyone (well, I know for a fact that it doesn't, but anyway), but if you want to ensure that you'll run into mechanical difficulties that mess with your schedule, make a reservation at a KOA. They have a mystical power of just picking up a sledgehammer and going at whatever means of transportation I'm using (well, so far just the bike).
Anyway, I was rolling through the Desert Cities (the stretch of I-10 in California from Palm Springs to Coachella) when, all of a sudden, the bike engine starts rapidly losing power. I pull into a gas station (the last one for twenty miles, as the bike luckily started dying less than a mile before the last exit of the cities) and see large quantities of oil all over, well, pretty much everything around the engine. I refill the oil, turn the bike back on, and confirm, yep, it's leaking oil. A lot. And due to the engine temperature, I can't do much, so I head inside to let it cool down for a while. After it's all cooled down, I make sure the oil is at the proper level and turn it back on. No oil seems to be leaking, so I head back for the interstate, three quarts of oil and a gallon of water crammed various places in my bags, as I'm heading into twenty miles of desert, and still have 90 miles to get to Blythe.
I just switched to present tense instead of past. Oops. Well, I'll leave it like that. Just don't think I didn't notice.
Anyway, I'm heading out of the parking lot, but the power doesn't seem right. I glance down and, yep, still leaking oil. I head into the nearest town with a motel, Indio, a mile or two to the west, and wait.
The next day is Sunday and nothing's open, so I just wait and nap and read. I finish Tom Sawyer and start The Screwtape Letters (I want to like C.S. Lewis, but he's just terrible at that whole “subtlety” thing), but that's not terribly interesting.
Monday comes. I take the bike to the shop and walk over to the nearest bookstore, well, the nearest store with books, which is a Target, and pick up The Devil and the White City, about the Chicago Exposition of 1893. It's excellent.
I read and nap more that day, and in the afternoon get a call that, well, the bike could be fixed, but it'd take at least a week and cost at least $700 in labor, before parts are taken into account, and it'd need a good deal of those. Basically, the engine needs completely redone. I pick it up from the shop and get it to limp back to the motel, but it isn't making it home under its own power.
I'd talked over this possibility with my parents the previous day, and had settled on a somewhat strange plan for if it was unfixable, or if it'd take too long to fix (I have work in Pennsylvania starting on the 23rd, and it's a four-day bike ride from Indio to Charlottesville, so there was only a week to get it fixed, and even that'd really be pushing it). The plan, as you may have noticed in a Twitter update I posted, was to mail it.
Well, not technically mail. I used UPS, not the USPS.
The following day, Tuesday the 14th, was a fun day. First thing in the morning I walked to a rental car place and picked up an SUV, and from there I promptly went to UPS to get boxes, Home Depot to get tools, and Target to get ziploc bags for bolts. I then spent the next seven hours in the parking lot of a Motel 6 completely disassembling the motorcycle, part for part. One box held the wheels, one held the body panels and the assorted bolts and small stuff, and one held the frame and the electrical system, as well as the shock absorbers. The gas tank got its own box. Originally I'd been planning on having the engine be my airline carry-on, but it was too greasy, so I wrapped it in some trash bags and headed into the UPS store to ship some of the boxes and pick up boxes for the engine.
When I got boxes in the morning (and then again at lunchtime), I had made passing reference to the fact that I was shipping a motorcycle, but I don't think they quite understood what that entailed. That trip, I carried in two boxes, one about 70 pounds, one 82, and both large enough to fit several bodies (possibly with a bit of dismemberment involved). I just brought in the raw gas tank and got a box for it and packed it on the spot, as it was small and easy to pack. I was about to purchase another couple boxes and some bubble wrap when the guy at the counter pointed out that they'd box up whatever you brought in for a couple bucks. I let out a probably somewhat disturbing laugh and walked outside, and walked back in from the parking lot carrying a 90-pound engine, still with cables, hoses, and kickstand attached. I set it down on the counter and just said, “Have fun.”
He found it entertaining, luckily, or else I'd be preparing right now for one of my packages to be mysteriously lost in transit.
I had to take in the final box, the one with the wheels, the next morning, as it wouldn't all fit in the back of the Jeep at the same time. I then dropped off that rental car and immediately picked up another one, as I needed to get to LAX for my flights home this evening (the first one of which I'm writing this during). While waiting to pick up the second one I read an article saying that, although I had found it absurdly hot, Indio and the area was actually going through an abnormally cold year:there had only been one day out of the first two weeks of June that was over 100 degrees, and that was the previous day, when I'd spent seven hours in the sun on asphalt disassembling the bike, at 108.
I took my time getting to LA, as I had to check out of my motel at noon but didn't depart until half past midnight. I had an excellent lunch at a little taco restaurant in Indio (one good thing about being so close to Mexico is that the Mexican food is delicious) and took three stops while driving to read a bit. Upon arriving at LAX I checked in, and found that my bags were slightly overweight, by a total of about four pounds, meaning instead of costing $60 to check them, it'd cost $160 (I'd basically just shoved my camping backpack in one duffel bag and the saddlebags in another). I'd need to get them down to 50 pounds each to prevent that. After much shuffling, including switching my FiveFingers that I'd been wearing with the boots I'd packed and deciding to sacrifice my shampoo, bottle of water, and sunscreen, and packing one FiveFinger shoe in each bag, I got them each to come in at 49.5 pounds. I checked them through, carried my daypack and motorcycle helmet up through security, and flew home.

Now that the detailed travelogue is done, time for all the inevitable philosophizing that naturally springs forth from adventures like this.
One thought that's been on my mind a lot in the past week has been that I need to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I've read a passage or two in philosophy classes, but only a few pages. However, it struck me, both while just riding and actually doing maintenance, how necessary a sense of focus and calm is when traveling extended distances. For the riding itself, you need to be able to remain focused on the road, completely on the road, while at the same time have your mind free to wander. If it isn't free to wander you'll burn out far too quickly, or at least I would. Riding isn't a stimulating enough activity (except on Californian highways, due to lane splitting being legal) to occupy me for the ten hours a day it sometimes had to, and so my I know have four pages of story ideas as well as seven different iPhone apps to write, as well as a song to attempt to compose. For the maintenance, you need to be able to pull together what you have with you, your knowledge of what's wrong, and your ideas about how to make it right, in order to do a quick patch on a 350-pound hunk of steel and rubber that'll soon be carrying you and a hundred pound of projectiles immediately behind you down the road at 80 mph (not that I would ever break the speed limit, of course). It takes confidence in your abilities and a calmness to ride anyway, even if you know things aren't perfect. Now, it wasn't quite this intense for me, as none of my fixes were the sort that'd cause a crash if they failed, but I think I could have managed if they had been.
This adventure stood in stark contrast to my last big adventure, Vietnam, in that this one was almost entirely transient, moving quickly from place to place, whereas in Vietnam we spent over a month in just one city (and then traveled around, to be sure, but the big part of the Asia section was just in Hue). Afterward we went to Europe, which was moving around, but staying in each place for longer.
As long as I can remember I've broken adventuring and wisdom-gathering in general (of which I consider adventuring a subset) into two groups. (These are by no means groups that I came up with myself; I'm certain they are not, and that I heard them somewhere else, although I'm not positive where. It may have been a book by Jostein Gaardner about Christmas that my parents used to read me each year, but it may also not have been. Anyway, point being, not my original idea, I just like it.) The way I remember it being explained was as a comparison of two desert wise men. One sits on a camel, and travels all across the world, learning a little bit about everything there is to see. The other sits atop an astronomy tower and, night after night, studies a single constellation, perhaps a single star, until he knows it completely, in and out. The analogy to adventuring should be clear. Having now tried both, I think I prefer the latter, and hopefully I'll get a chance to do more of it. I want to return to Vietnam and spend a lot more time there. It's a beautiful country, and there's something about the culture that's also quite intriguing. It'd help to learn Vietnamese (or at the very least French), but I have a few years until I'd be able to return anyway, so if I can work up the motivation, I'll give that a shot.

Well, that was the trip. I'm sure I'll write more about it when I post photographs, but that probably won't be for another day or two as I still need to transfer them over to my Mac and then sort through them all. (Also, I apologize if there are any typos or misspellings in this post, but it was primarily written on the plane ride home, which means I'd been up for twenty-four rather busy hours, and as such was a little tired.)

The past four or so days

2011-06-05T18:33:00.000-04:00

Sorry about the long time with no post, but once I got back to Leadville from Colorado Springs I was pretty busy for a few days.

Southwest:

After leaving Leadville I went to Taos, New Mexico. It's a little tourist town in northern New Mexico primarily centered around outdoorsy stuff in the Sangre de Cristo range of the Rocky Mountains, and just general southwestern-style Indian-themed stuff for people from Colorado who don't want to have to go too far south. I rolled in about midday after a mostly uneventful ride. I had a bit of trouble balancing all my bags on the bike, as I had accumulated a bit of stuff in Leadville, but I managed without crashing.

Upon arriving in Taos I realized I had a voicemail message on my phone (it's hard to hear anything above the sound of the engine of the motorcycle, especially with a somewhat-busted muffler). I'll write a whole post about that message later, but in this case later probably won't be until the end of the summer.

Once in Taos, I dropped all my stuff in a motel and set out in search of maps of Wheeler Peak, the hike I wanted to do the next day. After the troubles on Mt. Elbert I wanted to make sure that I had a damn good map.

I was able to find a quite good one, in what seems to be Taos's only outdoors store (the only one of which I could find any mention, at the very least). The cashier warned me, though, that there'd be two feet of snow on the mountain above 10,000 feet (that is, the entire length of the trail). A bit more than I'd like, but I wasn't going to let the weather stand in the way of another hike. This one was only to a bit more than 13,000 feet anyway, so at the very least there was less height to climb.

Someone in the restaurant I'm in just ordered a Miller Lite. It should be pointed out that I'm here for breakfast on a Sunday.

Anyway, after getting the map and a guide to the hike I headed back to the motel and got to sleep early, as I wanted to wake up before 6 the following morning. That didn't quite happen.

Marmots:

I rolled out of bed around 6:30 and managed to make it to the trailhead by 8. The trailhead was in the Taos Ski Valley, a small town (I believe the population is ~47, no joke) in the mountains outside of Taos that is, as you could probably guess, primarily concerned with skiing. The hike broke down into two parts. The first two miles was a hike up to William's Lake, a small (one or two acre, I would guess) lake at a hair over 11,000 feet. It was an easy hike, the kind I'm used to from Virginia. Elevation-gain-wise, even Humpback Rocks is more difficult (and as for the altitude, I was pretty much completely acclimated to Leadville's 10,000 feet at this point). I stopped at the lake for a breakfast of trail mix and to watch the chipmunks scurry around. Taos Ski Valley has chipmunks like UVA has squirrels. It's awesome.

Once I was ready to go I checked my GPS to see how far it was from there to the summit. It said about 4,000 feet. Not that hard. The hard part (that you already realize if you've been keeping track of all the numbers I've tossed around) is that there was also 2,000 feet of elevation gain.

(Aside: For those of you who don't have experience hiking tall mountains, for each 1,000 feet, imagine taking the stairs to the upper observation deck of the Empire State Building. It's about comparable.)

There was a trail that led from the lake to the summit along a slightly longer and less steep route (it probably stretched the distance out to a mile and a half of lateral motion), so I took this. The main change was over the first 500 feet of elevation gain, which wasn't too terribly much steeper than the earlier part of the trail, but it, like the trail up to the lake, was covered in fairly deep snow. On the way up, it was still early (I got to the lake around 9 and headed up around 9:15), so postholing wasn't too much of an issue.

(Another aside: “Postholing” is one of those terms used on internet forums that's never defined. If you've ever been hiking in the winter in an area where there's season-long snow cover, it doesn't need defined, as once you hear it, you know exactly what it means. Over the course of the winter, when the temperature gets above freezing, the uppermost snow melts, seeps down, and re-freezes, leaving a fairly strong top surface but normal fluffy snow below. If you're lucky you don't break through the top surface and it's just like walking on rough ice or dirt. If the ice isn't strong enough, you sink straight down, into snow that can be up to a few feet deep, as if you've just stepped into a post-hole. It happens more in the afternoon after the snow has had a chance to melt, but hasn't refrozen over the night.)

After that, it hit the last mile or so, where there was still 1,500 feet to gain. The first quarter or so was spent getting to the treeline, hiking up the rocky side of a chute of snow. After that, it was more rocks, just a steep, steep rocky slope, occasionally having to cross a bit of snow. There was a fair amount of snow, maybe a quarter of the mountain, but it was easy enough to avoid. The wind was strong, probably upwards of 60mph at the top, but not unmanageable (it was nothing compared with Pike's Peak).

Once I got to the top, I realized that the southern side of the mountain had significantly more snow – although it gets more sun, I guess the strong wind out of the north melts more snow. The summit itself was snow-free, except for a bit underneath some rocks piled to mark the top.

Also, marmots! It's good to know that no matter how good humans get at climbing mountains, marmots will be better. There were, in addition to the countless (okay, not countless, I did count: eleven, I think) marmots I saw on the way up, three just chilling on the summit as I approached. They scampered away once I got too close, but they were just sitting there, enjoying the view from 13,000 feet.

I got to the top a few minutes before noon, so over two and a half hours after leaving the lake. I stayed for a few minutes to take pictures before starting down a bit after noon. The first part of the descent was on the slow side – the highest part of the slope was nothing but talus and scree, so it was important to keep a steady footing while descending (although there were certainly parts where I felt like the illustration from the Magic card Avalanche Riders).

After that first part that was only rock, it sped up. The snow was avoidable, if I had wanted to avoid it, but that really didn't seem fun. There's a technical mountaineering term called “glissading” (not to be confused with the ballet term of the same name) that's basically a fancy-sounding French word for “sledding down a mountain without a sled”. Theoretically you do it with an ice ax to keep your speed in check, but I didn't have an ice ax, so my feet and my hiking poles had to do. And they worked masterfully – although it had taken me nearly three hours to get from the lake to the summit, it took me less than an hour to get down, because of the 2,000 feet I needed to descend, I'd estimate that at least a thousand of those were just sliding down the snow.

Back at the lake I took some pictures of the chipmunks before heading down. New Mexico is a really good state for seeing rodents: in addition to the marmots and chipmunks on Wheeler, I saw my first prairie dog in the wild in New Mexico, and also saw, although by no means for the first time, plenty of rabbits.

I got lunch (gazpacho) at the Bavarian Restaurant, conveniently located at the base of the trail (which happens to also be the base of the ski lift), and headed back to Taos proper. I did a bit of souvenir shopping for people (a reminder to people who have reason to believe you'll be getting something: keep in mind that I have highly limited packing space). Then, random work that needed to be done and then packing, and bed.

Desert Solitude:

The following morning was shipping a box of stuff home to Virginia so that I had less stuff with which to bike, and setting off for Shiprock, New Mexico, and then Page, Arizona. Shiprock was cool to see – it's a massive rock formation – but it was just a quick stop to admire it and take a few pictures. After that, on to Page.

Page is best known as a town set up to house the workers building the Glen Canyon Dam. As some of you know, I rather like Edward Abbey, and Edward Abbey rather hated Glen Canyon Dam, as he loved Glen Canyon, which was effectively destroyed by it (the canyon is still there, but it's now completely filled with water and known as Lake Powell). I wish I could've seen Glen Canyon, as from everything I've read it seems like a beautiful place, but such is life.

I camped there, and in the morning set out for Lone Pine, California. It involved crossing more state lines than any other day, I think (although it was only tied for most different states visited, at four), as I went from Arizona, to Utah, to Arizona, to Utah, to Arizona, to Nevada, to California, back to Nevada to fill up (so I didn't run out of gas in the middle of Death Valley), and then back to California.

A Surprising Lack of Mormons:

As I was going through Utah for the first time, the road twisted its way between a bunch of different mesas and hills that I just couldn't resist the urge to see closer up. I turned off onto one of the dirt side roads the cut across the desert, a rocky, tire-rutted trail across the sand, and less than a mile in, I crashed.

Not too bad, mind you. My wheels got trapped in a deep tire track left at some point that the road had been muddy, and the track turned before I was able to stop the bike, and I crashed. I wasn't doing more than fifteen miles an hour at this point, probably not more than ten, but the bike tipped over onto its left side (same as on Pike's Peak) with me still on it. The gear-shift pedal lever thing got bent, but I was able to bend it back to almost its original shape, and the left mirror shattered. With a ballpoint pen, the casing for the mirror, some electrical tape, and a supplementary convex mirror from an auto parts store I was able to make a passable replacement. I also lost the left passenger footrest (it didn't come off in the accident, but must've gotten loosened and fallen off sometime later), and the muffler repairs all got knocked around so as to be pretty much useless. I picked up more muffler tape but haven't had a chance to re-patch it yet (probably later today).

Pulp Fiction:

After that, it was relatively smooth sailing. I got annoyed and frustrated in Nevada in the section leading up to Las Vegas (now my second-least-favorite metropolitan area, just ahead of St. Louis). Way too many tractor-trailers. If any of you ever happen to drive a truck, please keep the following in mind: if you're going roughly the same speed as a small motorcycle, let the motorcycle be in front. Although it makes no difference to you, driving behind a truck is exceedingly difficult, due to the turbulence created, and as a result we either have to continually play leapfrog with you to avoid it, or slow down and let you get significantly ahead. This holds true for large motorcycles, too, but they've got enough power to just straight-up pass you and keep going. Small bikes such as mine max out at roughly 55-85 mph (depending on steepness of road, amount of luggage, and wind), and so we're stuck if you're doing the same speed as us, because on the interstate we're going as fast as we can.

Rant over.

Anyway, after that, Nevada wasn't too bad. After Nevada, after getting to California, I realized that, unless there happened to be a gas station in the middle of Death Valley, it was highly unlikely that I'd make it through with the amount of gas I had left. I turned around and had to backtrack about forty miles to the nearest service station (however beautiful the midwest and the southwest are, the barrenness is annoying when you're traveling with a 4-gallon gas tank). Tank filled, I set off into Death Valley, only to find that, about twenty miles in, there was, in fact, a gas station. The gas was $5.459 a gallon, but I'd have payed it given that I only would've needed two gallons, and that would've saved me about an hour and a half of driving time. Such is life. Next time I'll know.

Driving through Death Valley was fun, although it was also a little scary. I don't know whether it would've been better or worse to do it during the daytime, instead of the pitch blackness that I had. If it'd been light I could've seen the road a bit farther ahead, but I could've also seen over the side of the road, which, especially after Pike's Peak, would've been a bit scary (despite what almost all of my behavior seems to indicate, I am actually somewhat afraid of heights). It's called a valley, and yes, in the sense of having mountains on either side, it is a valley, but when you think of a valley, you, like me, probably think of a low place between two strings of mountains. It's true that Death Valley has low points – at one spot, I was over 100 feet below sea level. However, it then rises up to almost 5,000 feet, before dropping back to nearly sea level and then rising back up over 4,000 feet again, all in the course of twenty miles of road. I'm sure the views were excellent, but as it was as close to pitch black as I've ever come in nature (excluding one cave in Ha Long Bay where I literally hit my nose on the wall in front of my face), I couldn't see them.

California:

After that, Lone Pine, California, in Inyo County. Inyo is notable in that it contains both the highest (Mt. Whitney) and lowest (Badwater) points in the continental United States. I passed a few miles northeast of Badwater yesterday, and on Tuesday I'll be hiking to within a few miles of the Mt. Whitney summit. Due to the snow conditions, I won't be going for the top. It's advised that only those with significant winter mountaineering experience attempt the summit, and I have none, and am traveling alone (and, admittedly, don't much feel like looking for a group to join, as I like doing the hikes on this trip alone). So, I won't be going for the top, just one of the lower base camps. (To see the importance of experience and the potential risks of failure, go to the Wikipedia page for Mt. Whitney and look at the picture. There isn't currently that much snow, but still a significant amount.)

So, after arriving in Lone Pine, I checked into a motel and quickly passed out, because yesterday was a very long day. Today is planning and preparation and relaxation, as will be tomorrow.

I've taken photos of stuff the past few days, but because of the difficulties of working with them on this computer, I'm just going to hold off on posting them until the end of the trip. Speaking of which, where should I go next? I feel like changing the plan, so suggestions are welcome. I'm currently in eastern California, about the middle north-south wise, and after leaving here on the 9^th I've got about 10 days to make it back to Charlottesville. I can ride upwards of 600 miles a day. Any suggestions?

Full post tomorrow, I swear...

2011-06-05T02:56:00.000-04:00

I know I've been continually procrastinating on writing a blog post and said I'd write one tonight, but due to a string of things I didn't get into Lone Pine until just a short while ago, and as I woke up at around 6, I'm quite tired. So, bedtime.

Breaking things

2011-05-31T21:35:00.000-04:00

Sorry about the lack of a post last night.

As I mentioned in my last post, yesterday the plan was to bike Pike's Peak. It started out well enough. I slept in a bit too much (not a bad thing, though, as it means I'm dealing with the altitude better) and got headed out from Leadville around 8, arriving at the base of the mountain at roughly 10:30. I started up the highway, 19 curving miles leading from somewhere between 7,000 and 8,000 feet up to the summit at 14,115 feet. The first ten miles were fine. After that point it got a bit windy, but it was manageable. At 13 miles there's a second gate, where they can close the road if weather's bad, but they hadn't, and I kept going.

The wind above the 13 mile mark got a bit worse, until all of a sudden I hit a saddle between two higher points at a bit past the 17 mile point, with an elevation of between 12,000 and 13,000 feet, and the wind was just impossible. I had just managed to stop and had no time to turn the bike around and head back before a gust knocked it over, breaking the clutch lever and derailing the chain.

Gary and Janice, a nice retired (it seems) couple from southern California were, quite luckily passing by, and gave me a ride down the mountain (there was one car that passed before they did, but didn't bother to stop). Upon passing the 13 mile mark, we learned that they'd closed the upbound road as a result of winds of 102 mph that had been causing trouble for bikers (including people other than just me) and that had been blowing out the windows on some cars.

Once I was down at the base of the road, I called a tow truck and a few hours later the bike and I were sitting outside of a motorcycle shop in Colorado Springs. I left the bike there with a note about what was wrong with it and, with the help of my ground crew back in Charlottesville, found a nearby motel at which to spend the night. Luckily I've adopted the habit of always carrying at least one book with me, even if there isn't any time for me to read it in the plan.

This morning I went by the shop and explained what was broken, and they did one quick check of their storeroom and said, yep, we've got the part you need in stock. Forty-five minutes later I was back on the road, and after a quick stop by the motel to pick up the stuff I'd left there I was back on my way to Leadville.

About twenty miles outside of Leadville I passed an intriguing-looking side road that led up into the hills, so I followed that some ten or so miles until it became too snowy to continue. I took a few pictures of a cool overlook but I haven't pulled them off the camera yet.

From there, it was just back to my room in Leadville to begin packing and planning for the next leg of the trip, down to New Mexico and then over to California to hike Mt. Whitney.

I don't know if it's because of the trouble I had with Mt. Elbert, the bike accident on Pike's Peak, the highly mixed trip reports I've read about Whitney, or the fact that I've been away from home and on the move for a week, but this afternoon I was just hit with a massive wave of... I don't know exactly the right word for it. Malaise? Apprehension? Sadness? Not sure. Something like that, about the rest of the trip. Not really sure what to do. It's not like I can just say, oh well, trip over, and instantly be home. It's a three day trip from here, and once I get to California it's either four or five days. And even if I could just head back home, I'm not sure that's what I'd want. I absolutely hate going back on what I said I'd do, even if the only person I really said it to was myself.

Oh, well. I'll do some more reading and packing and see if my mood improves at all.

Fixing broken stuff (my bike and my skin)

2011-05-30T00:05:00.000-04:00

I took today off from hiking because of the amount of snow still here. Given the amount of time it took for the hike yesterday, any of the other ones I had planned would've taken probably 14 hours or more. I'd have to either start or finish after dark, and given the difficulty in seeing the trails even in the daylight, that just didn't seem safe. I'll hike Massive and Harvard some other time I'm in Colorado, when it's later in the season, or when I'm not traveling alone. Instead, tomorrow I'm going to motorcycle over to the top of Pike's Peak, and Tuesday, well, I'll figure out something to do on Tuesday.

Today, as a result of both some tough offroad-ish riding yesterday and the long ride tomorrow, I needed to improve the fix on the motorcycle. Here's what it looked like initially, in its very ghetto form (about a thousand miles after it was initially applied):

Now, after being replaced with hopefully better materials, here is its current form:

Note that there aren't soda markings anymore, because this was actually done with real sheet metal and not the scraps from what I drank along the way. Apart from that it's pretty much the same, admittedly, but this metal is thicker, and hopefully the new design of how I put the pieces on will do a better job of keeping everything securely sealed and in place. It's still aluminum, though, so it'll burn away eventually. I have a steel can of refried beans that I can use to patch it (once I eat the contents, of course), but they're still sitting unopened on the desk.

After that, I read a fair amount more (I'm now done with Invisible Cities and three chapters into Under the Black Flag) and went for a run (3.8 miles at an embarrassingly slow pace). After that, it was nearing sundown, so I biked up into the hills northeast of Leadville to try to get some good pictures of the sunset. Had there been a good sunset I'd have gotten some good shots, as I found an excellent vantage point, but there were too many clouds to the west and the sky just gradually darkened without much excitement. Here's a picture of where it would've been, though:

Now, as some of you may know, I kinda majored in physics (it's really weird to put that in the past tense). One of the things that I studied in my last physics class was radiation, its reflectivity off different materials, its effects on bodily tissue, and how its intensity changes when it travels through different substances. Somehow, yesterday I completely forgot all of this when hiking. I neglected to think about the fact that UV radiation 1) is more intense at higher altitudes, because there's 14,000 fewer feet of air to block it, 2) reflects extremely well off snow, and 3) has nasty effects on skin. As a result of forgetting all this and just thinking, it's cold, you can't get sunburned when it's cold, I neglected to put on sunscreen (despite bringing it with me from home, the thought of using it yesterday never even crossed my mind). Now, I have a nice, rather impressive sunburn over almost all of my face, the exceptions being where my hat and sunglasses covered the skin (on a side note, I simply do not know how I used to survive in the midday light without sunglasses). It's the first time I've had a second-degree sunburn, which is cool, but it makes it a bit painful to have anything touch my face (such as the shirts I'm wearing or my motorcycle helmet) because the skin's started to blister away in two places (none of this wimpy drying and flaking off a week later nonsense).

However, it's not all bad. There aren't many times in your life that you get to say that you've got a sunburn on the bottom of your nose (thank you, reflective snow), and the hair that wasn't under my hat or my jacket is now bleached as close to pure white as my hair's ever been, so I get to make women even more jealous of how my hair acquires excellent highlights without any work on my part.

Even stupidity can have its benefits sometimes, it would seem.

On an unrelated note to all the rest (except partially the mention of physics), here's an illustration of the effect of different altitudes on air pressure. Once I reached the summit yesterday I refilled the water bladder in my backpack from one of my water bottles, and here's the bottle after returning to 10,150 feet from the 14,440 at which it was sealed:

This just in: Memorial Day weekend has apparently been rescheduled for the middle of winter

2011-05-29T00:03:00.001-04:00

Today was the first hike of the trip. I decided to start off both ambitious and lazy, with the easiest hike I had planned, which happened to be up Mt. Elbert, the highest mountain in the state (and the second highest in the contiguous 48). According to the guidebook, it's a 6-9 hour hike, depending on how good of a hiker you are.

I left Leadville at about 7 and got to the trailhead around 7:30. There are two different start points for the trail I used (the South Mt. Elbert Trail), and I used the higher one, or as close to it as I could manage. The higher one (which, as you may have guessed, results in a shorter hike) was at the end of two miles of fire roads that are designed for four-wheel-drive vehicles. Well, my vehicle has one-wheel-drive, but I gave it a shot anyway and managed to make it about three-quarters of the way up before a section of the road was flooded. (Side note: it's a lot of fun to ride on back roads like this, but I think in the process I knocked the muffler and now need to fix it again.)

From where I started, the trail was an 8.5-mile round trip, with a bit over 4,000 feet of elevation gain. The first mile wasn't bad – it was a bit steep in places, but this is a fourteener, so that's kinda the point. After that, though, I hit the snow.

Now, I realize that I'm currently at both a higher elevation and a higher latitude than in Virginia, and both of these tend to result in colder temperatures, but it's Memorial Day weekend, basically the start of summer. And I knew there was snow on the mountains when I got here – it's pretty hard to miss. However, the sheer amount of snow was the surprise.

At first, it didn't seem like much. My boots sunk an inch or two, but that was it. Then, all of a sudden, I was up to my knee. I'm rather grateful that I made it back without a broken knee or ankle given the number of times I sunk in without warning, while my body kept moving forward.

It was a pretty even mix of ice-topped snow that would at least mostly hold my weight, and fluffy snow that I sank right through. Some of it was only a few inches deep, but after another mile and a half or so the snow started getting deeper, to the point where there were multiple times I sunk in all the way to my waist.

This waist-deep snow happened to unfortunately coincide with a section of trail that I could only discern by the snowshoeprints left by someone else, and also unfortunately coincided in many places with a stream. Now, I have relatively waterproof boots, so the occasional quick dip into the shallow stream when my foot went through the snow wasn't a terribly big deal. However, my boots are only waterproof up to my ankles, not my waist, so the snow still got them soaked inside and out.

The trail turned pretty steeply uphill, and it felt as much like climbing as hiking. The waist-deep snow continued, and the trees got a bit denser. Not enough to make it impassable, but enough to be an annoyance.

Eventually, I reached the treeline. This brought with it a revelation that, based on the trail condition, I'd been somewhat expecting: I wasn't on the trail. The snow covered any markings on the ground, so all I had to go by were the snowshoeprints, and apparently whoever left them decided to be adventurous.

(Random side note: Mushroom/pineapple/jalapeno pizza is delicious. Especially after a day of hiking.)

Past the treeline, the trail itself isn't incredibly important for navigation purposes. I was going to the highest point for three hundred or more miles, so it was pretty easy to see which way I needed to go. However, trails are designed to follow relatively easy slopes, instead of going straight uphill. What followed was by far the most tiring two miles I've ever hiked. It was pretty much straight uphill, through the snow, although there weren't any spots in this section more than thigh deep.

By the time I was approaching the summit I was stopping every minute or two to catch my breath. Above 13,000 feet, 50 steps was the most I was able to manage without a break.

The terrain thankfully leveled out about five hundred feet from the summit, and the last section was a much gentler slope, culminating in a mound of rock and snow that made me the highest man in Colorado (with the possible exception of the folks who run the medical marijuana dispensary in Leadville).

For as far as I could see in any direction, there was no one. I passed two folks who were coming down while I was struggling up the last thousand feet, but that was it my entire time on the mountain, and they were long gone by the time I made the summit. It was 3:30 at that point, a full eight hours after leaving the trailhead.

I rested for a few minutes and took some pictures. It definitely ranks in my top 4 scenic landscapes. The first is a valley on the Vietnam/Laos border, the second is the area around the Temple of Delphi in Greece, and the third is the view around a lake in Norway (there should be pictures up of that one, back in late April or early May of 2009). The view from Elbert is definitely at least fourth, possibly higher. The exact rankings fluctuate based on my mood (right now, for example, the warmer the place, the more appealing it is, hence Vietnam and Greece taking the top two spots).

After enjoying the top for a few minutes I headed back down. However, it was a bit difficult to find the proper trail, because there are trails leaving in three or four directions, and only the footprints even indicated these. I initially took the wrong one, but it quickly became apparent when I compared the surrounding terrain to my map, and I was able to make my way around the slope leading to the summit to reach the trail I had intended to follow up to the top in the first place. Getting down from there was relatively simple, although still tiring and long. I got back to the bike at 7:15, nearly twelve hours after starting on a hike that wasn't supposed to take longer than nine even for a relatively inexperienced hiker such as myself. Right before reaching the bike it started raining, but just a few drops, not enough to really bother me.

After that, I hurried back to Leadville, and am currently sitting in the Tennessee Pass Cafe enjoying pizza and still suffering a bit from altitude sickness. On the one hand it's annoying – getting out of breath so easily sucks, and the trouble sleeping is also a bother, but the fact that after less than half of a 12” pizza I'm full, when all I've eaten today is trail mix and sunflower seeds, is a nice change from my usual overeating.

Anyway, all in all hiking Mt. Elbert was something that I'm very glad I did, but also something I'm very glad is over. I had planned on also hiking Mt. Massive and Mt. Harvard, but given the amount of remaining snow, as well as the fact that there's more in the forecast for tomorrow morning, I might just rest up and run a bit and try to get more used to the altitude before Mt. Whitney on the 7^th. I don't particularly want to die in a snowdrift or have to be medevaced off a mountain, and given that I'm hiking solo, if something bad happens (as easily could've today, were it not for me being, as one friend put it when marveling at how life just seems to work out for me, seemingly protected by divine forces) those are the only two options. At the very least, I'll take tomorrow off. I might hike Massive on Monday or Tuesday if I'm feeling up to it.

And now, as a treat for those of you who've actually stuck it out through the past thousand-odd words, photos:

This is the trail intersection where I made a wrong turn. See that massive trail that goes straight, and the tiny little thing off to the right? I think you can guess which one is the correct one, based on what happened.

I like portrait photography, but as I'm traveling alone, I have to choose less-than-human subjects, like my hiking pole.

See that mound of snow in the center, the one covered in glare from the sun? Yeah, I hiked that. And this wasn't even taken from the bottom of the trail. There were still at least two miles left. (And the actual peak isn't even visible in this, it's a bit farther back and to the left, but because of the change in slope it's blocked from this angle.)

A layered shot of the lake and trees at the base of the mountain.

This is a flower that was growing in the snow on the eastern slope of Elbert. Reminds me of the flower from Batman Begins, but I didn't check to see whether it gets you high.

A photograph from the summit. If you look at it upside down it can almost (not quite, but almost) pass as the snow-covered shore of a lake, with the clouds reflected in the water.

(I apologize for none of the photos being post-processed, but I don't have any editing software on my netbook.)

The past few days

2011-05-27T18:21:00.000-04:00

I'm going to start giving sections of the trip titles to sum up their general feelings. Tuesday was "Biking". Wednesday morning was "Macgyver". Wednesday afternoon was "Tilting at tornadoes". Thursday morning was "Flatland", and Thursday afternoon was "Proving 250-haters wrong: 1750 miles to Leadville". Today is "Ultramarathoners are insane". Now, to explain each of those.

Macgyver
On Tuesday evening in Santa Claus I wrote about the issues with the bike, about how it had been overheating. As it turns out, it wasn't overheating. Or, more accurately, that wasn't the primary problem. The primary problem was that one of the mufflers had become almost completely detached. In addition to making the bike annoyingly loud, this also messes with engine compression, hence some/all of the problems. Luckily, with a mix of muffler tape, soda cans, and hose clamps, I was able to patch the very inconveniently placed holes. It is probably the ghetto-est looking automotive fix I've ever done, even beating out the time I fixed an engine with just a ballpoint pen because this is nice and out in the open, but for the most part it's been working fine. All I've had to do is occasionally tighten the clamps.
On a note unrelated to the fix, I also came closer than I'd ever come before to being in a motorcycle accident. First, a couple informational points for non-motorcycle riders:
1. Head and tail winds can be annoying or helpful, respectively, but crosswinds are straight-up deadly. If they gust they can force you off the road or into another lane of traffic, and if they're constant they force you to effectively bike at a slight angle to counteract the force (this is especially true for tiny bikes like the one I ride).
2. Tractor trailers (or any large object) block the wind for an area around them. If there's no wind, the only dead spot is behind them, and a common hypermiling technique is to drive in this area of no wind in order to cut down air resistance. If there's a cross-wind, there are also dead spots like this on the sides.
These side dead spots are the important ones. I was cruising along in the right lane as I usually do when a tractor trailer came to pass me, going significantly faster than I was. Once it got past me, I hit the dead spot, and because I'd been correcting for the crosswind, I started moving towards the truck, which forced me to correct quickly in the other direction. As soon as I could do this, the truck got ahead of me and the dead spot passed. At this point the crosswind came back, knocking me strongly to the right, which was already the direction I was headed to avoid the truck. As a result I had to screech to a halt on the shoulder to avoid going into the weeds at highway speed, which wouldn't have been very good.

Tilting at tornadoes
While stopped at a delightful combination gas station and liquor/fireworks store (we really need one or ten of those in Charlottesville), a passerby informed me that she hoped I wasn't heading west, because there was a tornado warning just past St. Louis. Unfortunately, that's exactly where I was headed, and because I was already running late for the day and don't have as much flex time as I would like built into my schedule before hiking Mt. Whitney, I kept going, as fast as possible to make it through the storm quickly. Not necessarily the smartest move (in fact, I think it's safe to say that it's definitely the dumbest move I could've made in the situation), but it's what I did because, well, why not. I ran into hideous traffic going through St. Louis (one of the reasons it's now my least-favorite US metropolitan area, and second worldwide), and as soon as I got through that I hit the storm.
Rain wise, I've seen worse. Wind-wise, I've seen worse. Combination of the two, well, I've still probably seen worse, but never on a motorcycle on the highway. There were parts of it where the only way I could see where the road went was because of the taillights of the cars ahead of me, and the strong winds, plus slick road that prevented quick steering, meant I was drifting the entire width of the lane. I never went into another lane (I had my default position be the far left side, and the wind was coming from the left), but it was close. Luckily after Mt. Whitney I won't be on as tight a schedule and I'll be able to stop and sit out storms like that.
Because of going through the storm, though, I made it to Salina, Kansas. Because of how wet and cold I was I just checked into a motel instead of the campground I'd been planning on using, and it was completely worth the extra cost.

Flatland
Thursday morning was nothing but heading west through Kansas, and Kansas is flat. If you've never been there, you really can't appreciate the accuracy of that statement. There are points where the horizon is, as near as I can tell, a flat line all around.
I stopped for a picnic lunch at the highest point in Kansas, Mt. Sunflower, although calling it a mountain is misleading. The prominence over the surrounding farmland is a whopping 19 feet, and it takes hundreds of feet in any direction to find a point that much lower.
Getting to Sunflower requires miles of driving on largely unmarked back-country Kansas gravel farm roads, and multiple times I thought I was lost, but I managed to make it there, and then back to the interstate, without any wrong turns. I also got to experience the rare feeling of not actually knowing which state I was in, because the back roads criss-crossed from Kansas to Colorado without any sort of marking.

Proving 250-haters wrong: 1750 miles to Leadville
After leaving Kansas, the first part of Colorado wasn't much different. The elevation was slightly higher but the overall feeling was the same. Once I got past Denver, though, I finally realized that the unmoving clouds on the horizon were, in fact, the Rocky Mountains.
As I've mentioned before, I ride a 250-cc motorcycle. That is, by most definitions, quite small, and as a comparison, it generates one-tenth the horsepower of a modern sport bike (20 vs. 200). On the east coast, that's fine. It can't quite make it to the speed limit on the uphill parts of I-64 where the limit got raised to 70, but overall it manages just fine. Here, it struggled at times to maintain 45mph. I had to drive in third gear (out of five) on the interstate. However, despite these struggles, it made it, despite the common perception of 250s as being neither touring motorcycles nor good on hills. And I'll confess, it certainly isn't ideal for either of these, but when you need it to, it can pull through just fine.
Anyway, after all the mountains, both the incredibly slow uphills and probably slightly too fast downhills, I made it to Leadville, Colorado, roughly 1,750 miles west of, and approximately two miles above, Charlottesville.

Ultramarathoners are insane
As some of you may know, it's harder to breath the higher above sea level you are. I'm not sure about the number for Leadville, but on the summit of the highest peak I'll be hiking, Mt. Whitney, which is 4,300 feet above Leadville's elevation, you're only getting 58% of your normal oxygen. Here it isn't quite that bad, but it's still enough to make breathing noticeably more difficult, even when you're just sitting there. This hypoxia (lack of oxygen) causes what is known as altitude sickness, which I'm currently suffering. The symptoms are headaches, trouble sleeping, and loss of appetite (there are more, but those are the ones I'm feeling). They've been getting better the longer I spend here and they'll continue to improve as I stay at elevations like this, as my body acclimates to the air.
As some others of you may know, there's an annual race in Leadville, the Leadville Trail 100. It's been held each August since 1983 and it is, as the name might suggest, a 100-mile trail race. Such "ultramarathons" have grown in popularity the past few decades after the realizations that humans are actually not all that bad at running seemingly absurd distances. Leadville was started because someone wanted to combine those absurd distances with altitude sickness, because 100 miles on its own just isn't tough enough.
I feel completely confident in saying that I'll never run 100 miles. The farthest I've ever run is a little over a half-marathon, and I doubt that I'll break that anytime soon. Earlier today, I went for a shorter run, just 2.6 miles, and I have to say, anyone who willingly runs in the Leadville 100 is insane. 2.6 was tough enough, although admittedly at the end it wasn't that bad. You're already out of breath when you start, but it didn't really feel that different from running, say, the last 2.6 miles of a 5 or 8 mile run, from a breathing perspective. However, running that 40 times is just crazy (not that that's necessarily a bad thing, I should point out. I'm sure many people would consider a lot of the things I do to be crazy, but that doesn't make me think they're bad ideas).
The rest of the day has been spent getting ready for hiking tomorrow: getting maps, washing all the clothes that unfortunately got soaked and smelly as a result of one of my saddlebag rain-covers blowing away during the storm outside St. Louis, and reading.

I've taken a fair number of pictures, but I forgot that Windows doesn't have built-in support for Canon .cr2 raw files, so it'll take me some time to convert them over. I probably won't end up posting them until much later, perhaps the end of the trip, but from now on I'll make sure to shoot in both .jpg and .cr2.
And now, time to read more. Toodles.

Day one: Biking

2011-05-24T22:32:00.000-04:00

Today's a new record for me, motorcycling-wise, as I biked roughly 590 miles, or 90 more than I ever have in a day. If all goes according to plan tomorrow will be yet another record (but we'll see how well that works out).
I started the day off with a family farewell breakfast at the Tavern, and then hit the road a bit before 9:30. Virginia went well, as I didn't hit any rain, but once I got to West Virginia I encountered a few squalls. I took a brief nap right before reaching Kentucky, which proceeded to go by pretty quickly. Then, Indiana.
Right about when I hit Indiana the bike started behaving a bit strangely. It sputtered a bit and burned through gas much more quickly than it should've (getting just a bit over 40 mpg instead of the 50 from earlier today). This combined with the fact that eastern Indiana is seemingly devoid of all civilization made for a bit of a nerve-wracking ride, but eventually I was able to make it to my campground in Santa Claus, Indiana. No clear determination of what's wrong with the bike, but the most likely thing was overheating, as it'd done 500 miles in 70-80s degree heat before encountering difficulties.
I have to admit, I'm always a bit nervous at the start of trips like this (although the only really comparable thing I've done is backpacking around Europe with my brother two years ago, so it's a small sample size). There are so many things that could potentially go wrong. Normally in my life I just assume that everything'll work out fine and then just deal with it when it doesn't, but any one thing going wrong right now could cascade into a whole massive mess of delays. The bike is the big thing I'm worried about right now, although I do expect it'll work better tomorrow once it's had a chance to cool. Regardless of whether the problem persists, though, I'm going to get a bigger bike before going on another long bike trip like this again. The Nighthawk can just barely make it up to the speed limit on the interstate when loaded with stuff, and it's clearly struggling to do that.
However, that's not going to be feasible until the fall, and right now, I need to get to bed so I can get an early start tomorrow.

Biking and Hiking

2011-05-23T16:24:00.003-04:00

Tomorrow morning I'll be departing on my bike trip across the country. I delayed starting by a day after realizing that a) I had way too much to do here to get it all done on Sunday evening and b) that I had overestimated how long some of the biking and hiking would take. I'll be spending tomorrow night in Santa Claus, Indiana, and the following night in Salina, Kansas. After that, it's five days in Leadville, Colorado, the highest incorporated city in the US, during which I'll be hiking the three highest peaks in Colorado. On one of those days, I'll blog about the trip there.

On an unrelated note, I'm now a college graduate. Woo.

(The picture at the top is a photograph from my trip to the Kentucky Derby (well, technically the ride back), taken by my bike-mounted camera.)

Why I'm a physics major

2011-04-22T02:08:00.001-04:00

I don't really plan on going into physics in the long run, and I'm really not doing all that much with it even now, but I just can't help but take the sorts of classes where I'm working on a problem set and just stop cold, realizing that what I'm calculating explains how the very atoms in the paper I'm looking at, the pen I'm holding, even my own body, came into being.

Post-graduation trip

2011-04-12T13:20:00.006-04:00

So, following graduation I'm planning on going on a motorcycle trip across the country. The southwest is the one big part of the country I've never been to, and so it seemed like a good idea to use my month off to go and give it a look. I'm also going to hike a couple fourteeners (peaks over 14,000 feet above sea level), as I've never done that and it seemed like fun. Riding 8 hours a day for multiple days in a row might not be the best plan, but, well, we'll see. Worst case, it'll at least be an interesting experience, even if not necessarily a purely fun one.

Here's my current itinerary:

May 23-25: biking (along the way visiting the highest point in Kansas)
May 26: hiking Mt. Massive, Colorado (third-highest mountain in the contiguous 48 states, 14er)
May 27-28: hiking Mt. Elbert, Colorado (second-highest mountain in the contiguous 48 states, 14er)
May 29-30: hiking Mt. Harvard, Colorado (fourth-highest mountain in the contiguous 48 states, 14er)
May 31: biking
June 1: hiking Wheeler Peak, New Mexico (highest mountain in New Mexico)
June 2: biking + visiting Shiprock, New Mexico
June 3-4: biking
June 5-6: extra days built in to deal with delays
June 7-8: hiking Mt. Whitney, California (highest mountain in the contiguous 48 states, 14er)
June 9-10: biking
June 11: hiking Humphreys Peak, Arizona (highest mountain in Arizona)
June 12-13: biking
June 14: hiking Guadalupe Peak, Texas (highest mountain in Texas)
June 15: biking
June 16: biking + hiking Driskill Mountain (highest point in Louisiana)
June 17: biking + hiking Woodall Mountain (highest point in Mississippi)
June 18: biking
June 19: hiking Cheaha Mountain (highest point in Alabama)
June 20: biking, and arriving home in the evening

And then on June 23rd I get to bike another couple hundred miles up to Lancaster, Pennsylvania for CTY, where I'll be TAing cryptology and advanced cryptology. Fun times.

The order of the first three hikes might change (they're all in pretty much the same place), and I'll probably visit an extra city or two along the way. I have to do the Mt. Whitney hike June 7th-8th, so I have buffer days beforehand that might not be used. I've also assumed the longest for things that might take 1 or 2 days, such as hiking Mt. Elbert.

I've never done any hikes as long as these, so it should be an adventure to see how I manage. I might switch around the order of Massive/Elbert/Harvard so that I start with the easiest and end with the hardest, so I know better how to pace myself for the more difficult ones. We shall see, though. There's certainly something to be said for doing challenging things (if there weren't, I wouldn't be doing this trip).

Another photo

2011-03-22T16:05:00.002-04:00

The advantages of being up at 4 am

2011-03-22T15:04:00.002-04:00

I was up late last week working on physics homework, and when I went to turn it in, the moon looked really cool. So, here's an HDR photo of it over UVA's grounds.

This is why you do not block with the edge of a sword.

2011-02-24T00:49:00.002-05:00

When teaching kendo, one important thing about which to remind students is that it's bad to block with the blade of a sword, because it gets damaged very easily. It's better to block with the flat of the blade. This picture (of my wakizashi, after I've clearly messed up a few times) illustrates why.
It also illustrates one of the flaws with movie swordfights: this is what is necessary to produce sparks when swords clash. The sparks are the steel being heated rapidly due to the pressure of a sharp blade hitting a sharp blade. Trust me, if swords in movies actually were real, there wouldn't be any of these ancestral blades being passed down generation after generation. They might be useful as a saw or a steak knife or a file, but definitely not as anything meant to have a continuous, non-serrated edge like a sword.

More Florida photos

2011-01-10T18:12:00.002-05:00

Editing bird photos is difficult, so these aren't great, but I gave it a shot.

A few Florida photos

2011-01-09T02:19:00.003-05:00

Some photos from being in Florida this past week. I might post a few more as I get the time to edit them.

[Obviously, the above photo has been edited more than I usually do.]

New Year's Resolutions

2011-01-02T02:43:00.004-05:00

My resolutions for this previous year:
1. Lose weight - didn't quite accomplish this one.
2. Eat pie - definitely accomplished this one.
3. Write - didn't accomplish this one as much as I'd like. Did a little bit, but not enough.
4. Build stuff - a little bit. Not as much as I'd like.
5. Climb stuff - a little bit. Not as much as I'd have liked, but a fair amount, and I taught myself how to rappel, so overall I'd consider it a success.
6. Get the bus legal - not quite. At the end of the year there was one heating pipe and two pieces of brake line keeping it from being street legal. Now, after some work this morning, only the two brake lines remain, and they're sitting in the garage, it's just really wet outside and so crawling around on the ground seemed uncomfortable.
7. Bike - I did a bit, but not much.
8. Run - I picked this back up near the end of the year without even realizing I had resolved to do so. I went for the longest run I ever have (10.6 miles) and was able to run relatively regularly, so I'll consider this at least somewhat successful.
9. Test in karate - Nope. Work at the same time as one class and APO at the same time as another, so I wasn't able to.
10. Be a better person - definitely not my place to judge whether or not this was successful.

Now, my resolutions for the upcoming year:
1. Eat pie - more symbolic than anything else, basically a reminder that even in trying to accomplish my more serious goals, I need to remember that the end goal of all of these is to make myself happier, and so if one of them is seriously hurting that, it isn't worth it.
2. Run 365 miles, including in the Charlottesville 10-miler - This winter I took up running, and I want to keep with it. My knee has been bothering me because I started perhaps a bit too quickly, but with proper care I should be able to manage that well enough.
3. Lose weight to 160 lbs. - I haven't weighed this for four years, and I want to get back there.
4. Test in Myo Sim - Either karate or kendo, as I'm moving away from Charlottesville and won't have much of another chance.
5. Be more organized - I'm incredibly disorganized, and I want that to change.
6. Build stuff - Something I very much like, but never get to do enough.
7. Climb stuff - Another thing I very much like, but don't get to do enough.
8. Work on learning an instrument - I've worked on flute and guitar on and off for years, but I really want to just stick with one and practice it regularly.
9. Work on learning a language - I've studied four (apart from English) but I haven't kept up with any of them. I want to pick one (perhaps a new one) and reach some basic level of proficiency.
10. Be a better person - Always an important thing to work on, and one I often feel I'm quite lacking in.

Kalashnikitty

2010-12-25T19:21:00.002-05:00

The Kalashnikitty is a .22 caliber AK-47 lookalike that my brother and I painted with a Hello Kitty motif. It was a Christmas present for my mom who, needless to say, loved it.

The rifle is an Armscor AK-22, a strictly semi-automatic rifle that fires high-velocity .22 LR rounds. Even after the painting, it's still a fully-functional firearm.

The painting itself was done with Lauer Custom Weaponry's DuraCoat, with two layers of white covered, in places, with four more layers of pink. The flowers and kitties are stickers glued to the stock and magazine.

We got the idea from both an AR-15 painted in a similar style and an actual AK-47 painted a la Hello Kitty but in a much different style.

Final N900 Project

2010-12-15T12:14:00.002-05:00

For whatever reason, my web space on the UVA directory is being finnicky, so I'm posting the stuff for my final project for Computational Photography here.

Text:
These images were taken with a program written for the Nokia N900 smartphone. The program is designed to distort the color and intensity of the image while still leaving its general shape and contours intact. It does this by taking the value for each pixel and multiplying it by 3, then, if it's outside the acceptable range for a pixel (0-255), it reduces it modulo 256. If after the multiplication it isn't out of range, though, the program simply divides it by 3 to return it
to its original value. In addition to creating a visually unique image, this leaves the subject matter of the image recognizable, albeit in a distorted form. The artist is left with a stunning, colorful image that also challenges the viewer's normal perception of the world around them by presenting it through a filter they've probably never before seen.

Photos:

Adulthood...

2010-11-29T13:59:00.004-05:00

...is sneaking up way too fast. Boo. I just applied for graduation from UVA and that really drove home the realization that I enter the real world, or at least something vaguely resembling it, next year, and I don't feel prepared at all.

Anyway, I realized today that I hadn't blogged in a while, so here's a quick overview of recent moderately-noteworthy events in my life, in no particular order:
1. I will have a job next year.
2. I will graduate in the spring, unless I fail a combined five classes this semester and next.
3. I took the CS GRE a few weeks ago, even though I'm not going to grad school right now. No word yet on how I did.
4. Next semester I'll be taking Widely Applied Physics 2 instead of Computational Physics 2. I'll also be taking Advanced SCUBA and I'll be TAing a CS class.

I haven't been doing as much photography this semester as I'd like, but here are a couple pictures that I took and slightly edited for my Computational Photography class:

Boo Cavalier Computers, and other stuff

2010-11-08T14:51:00.000-05:00

I probably would've blogged before now, but my usual computer has been in the shop for the past week. Most of the time it's refusing to turn on, so I took it into the University's computer service center. Currently they're telling me that it's a software problem, which is incorrect, as it can't be a software issue when it never even gets to the step where it accesses the hard drive. The closest it might be is a processor firmware issue, which definitely isn't from anything I did (and I seriously doubt it's even that, given that I'm not sure it even gets the processor running when it refuses to start). Unfortunately it's an intermittent problem and they say that the hardware diagnostics all were fine and that they haven't been able to replicate the problem, so they haven't been able to fix it, and assuming the problem doesn't manifest itself while they're playing around with it, they might not even be able to be convinced that there's something wrong. Boo.

Anyway, I'm currently writing here because I'm sitting in Computer Architecture and we're reviewing a test that we haven't gotten back yet, because I hate reviewing tests I haven't received. I can never remember what I answered for each question and consequently worry that I got everything wrong. I didn't do great on this test, for sure, but I still hate thinking about my grade after I've taken the test and before I actually get it back.

I'll probably be posting some photographs this afternoon after I do my Computational Photography homework for tomorrow. We need to dodge/burn and sharpen a black and white photograph. I've done one but I'm going to try to do a second in the hopes that it'll turn out a little bit better, and once I've done that I'll post them here.

Next spring's tentative schedule

2010-10-28T10:11:00.003-04:00

So, I haven't yet signed up for classes, but as I've got one of the first registration spots out of the whole student body, I'm fairly confident I'll get the classes I want. Those classes are:

Math 3340 - Complex Variables with Applications - Not necessarily the most fun course, but the only undergraduate math class here I haven't taken, so I figured I'd give it a shot.

Physics 5640 - Computational Physics 2 - Again, not necessarily the most fun course, but I need one more physics class for the major, and I feel like being a masochist and taking another graduate level class after being thoroughly destroyed by the one I'm currently doing.

CS 4630 - Defense Against the Dark Arts - Sadly this is in the Computer Science department and not the Hogwarts department, but it should still be fun to learn how to prevent people from messing with my computer.

CS 4710 - Artificial Intelligence - Sounds fun.

Architecture 1020 - Lessons in Making - My fun creative class for the semester. An introductory class in design, something I'm interested in.

Photo editing

2010-10-28T10:06:00.002-04:00

A random edited photo I did in Computational Photography today. You'll notice that it's slightly brighter and slightly less realistic than the edit of this photo I posted here.

OBC, day 11

2010-10-12T01:49:00.001-04:00

Today's prompt: “Write your NaNoWriMo protagonist doing something he or she would never do.” I don't yet have a NaNo protagonist chosen, as I may very well not do NaNo this year, but here's one guy I've been tossing around as a possibility having a meeting he swore he'd never have.

“You see, Arthur, there isn't anything wrong with this,” Jonathan said. He held out his hand for the old man, old but not frail, and Arthur refused it. He placed one foot, gingerly, on the dock, his other still firmly on his boat's deck.

Arthur locked eyes with the businessman before him. He didn't trust him. He knew they wanted him to quit fishing, to leave the waters and let them move in, and he knew he wouldn't. It went against everything he believed to even just talk to them, but his father had always told him “Know thine enemy,” and he figured he should at least give it a shot. There wasn't an offer they could put on the table to make him come ashore for good; he just wanted to know how much he was worth to them.

“It just doesn't feel right,” Arthur muttered as he lifted his foot from the boat and set it unsteadily on the dock. It was the first time in years that he had been on anything resembling solid land.

“Give it a minute and it'll be fine.” Jonathan checked his watch. “The car's right this way.”

“No,” Arthur said.

“I was under the impression we were going to talk, and don't you want a place a bit more comfortable than this dock?”

“There,” Arthur said. He pointed to a restaurant, built as an offshoot of the pier. There was a walkway to the shore, but its bulk sat above the water.

“Are you sure I can't convince you to come back to our offices?”

“It's either there or I sail away right now.”

“Let me make a quick call,” Jonathan said. He pulled out his phone and began to dial.

Arthur stepped back onto his boat and began uncleating the mooring lines.

“Okay, we can meet there,” Jonathan agreed, lowering his phone without making a call. “It'll take my people a little while to get here, though.”

“I'm fine with that.” Arthur recleated the lines and sat down, his legs dangling over the edge of the boat's deck. He watched as Jonathan typed a message on his phone, wondering exactly what it said. Crazy kook refuses to go on dry land, so we'll need to meet here on the dock. Or maybe something simpler, such as, Meeting moved to dock. Arthur really wasn't sure what level of formality to expect from the annoyed correspondences of a business executive.

Twenty minutes later, a black sedan pulled noiselessly into the parking lot at the shore end of the restaurant's walkway. Arthur laughed as he stood up and stepped back to the dock. “Still going with the black luxury cars? I've always been a bit surprised that you execs don't drive Corvettes or something a little more fun.”

“We don't usually drive ourselves,” Jonathan said. “The stockholders consider it safer to have professionals do that.”

Arthur snorted out another laugh. “When was the last time you drove a car?”

“I don't have a license, actually. I grew up in the city and never needed one.”

Arthur began walking slowly towards the restaurant's backdoor, opening onto the dock. “So what do you do besides trying to convince me to give up my fishing license?”

“I'm the chief operating officer for the North American division of Petrochem. I run everything we do on this continent.”

“And yet you've still got the time to come down here to try to persuade me to quit?”

“I wish you wouldn't view giving up your fishing license as quitting. It'll be a change of occupation, for sure, but these days everyone changes jobs at some point in their life.”

“You kids these days are a new generation. Back in my day, when people started a job, they stuck with it.”

“It's not like you'll be deserting a promise you made.”

“Stop using future tense. I haven't agreed to anything yet. You still need to make an offer that I accept.”

Jonathan smiled a salesman's confidant facade. “I'm sure we won't have any trouble working out some sort of agreement.”

Arthur and Jonathan walked into the restaurant. It was busy, but in a corner, set apart from the rest of the diners, sat a table at which sat a man in a black pinstriped business suit matching Jonathan's.

Jonathan sat down next to his colleague, and Arthur took a seat across the round table.

“Jonathan said you had a driver bring you. Where is he?”

“Our drivers are out with our cars,” Jonathan's associate said.

“Don't want to invite them in here for a bite to eat? I'm sure they're hungry from driving around all day.”

“It's generally considered bad practice to bring unnecessary personnel to business negotiations. I'm Nathaniel, by the way.” Nathaniel extended his hand across the table to Arthur, who ignored it. After a moment he pulled it back. “Would you like something to eat, or shall we commence with negotiating a price?”

“I can eat on my boat,” Arthur said. “What price are you offering?”

“We're prepared to offer you two million dollars for you to give up your fishing license.”

Arthur looked across the table, no emotion showing on his old face. “You've got to be kidding me.”

“More than you were expecting?” Jonathan asked. “It's certainly more than we discussed over the radio.”

Arthur laughed. “Now, perhaps my understanding of exactly what you want to do is flawed, but you need me to surrender my fishing rights so that you can use the bay as an algae farm.”

“That's correct. Our use would render fishing impossible, and the states involved have said that as long as there's a valid fishing license out for anyone on the bay, we can't begin,” Nathaniel explained. “Hence our generous offer.”

“And what exactly do you need all this algae for?”

“It produces biodiesel as a by-product of photosynthesis.”

“How much?” Arthur asked. “Do you really need the whole bay for it?”

“It produces about 20 gallons per acre per day, so in order to produce a sizable quantity of oil we need a lot of space,” Nathaniel said.

Arthur looked up at the ceiling, numbers churning around in his head. “So you're offering me two million dollars while you stand to earn, what, close to a hundred million a day as a result?”

“Not a hundred million,” Jonathan said. “We won't have complete bay coverage. Most of the estuaries and inlets are functionally unusable.”

“Regardless, an offer of two million is laughable,” Arthur said. “Look, I realize I probably strike you two gentlemen as an old man who can be bought over by a bit of money. And yes – two million dollars is a fair amount of money, certainly enough for me to retire off of – but compared to what you stand to gain from all this, it's an insult.”

Arthur stood. “I'm sorry, Jonathan, Nathaniel, but you'll need to find another bay for your oil farm.”

“We can up the offer,” Nathaniel hastened to say. “That was just our initial offer.”

“You had your chance and you blew it.”

“How about ten million?” Jonathan offered.

“You had...”

“Twenty?” Nathaniel asked.

“Your chance...”

“Fifty?” Jonathan reluctantly tried.

Arthur stopped and turned around. Jonathan smiled.

“As I was saying,” Arthur continued. “You had your chance, and you blew it.” The old man turned back around and walked slowly out of the restaurant, as the two men sat in stunned silence at the nicked and dirty wooden table.

As soon as he was back aboard Arthur set a course in his autopilot for the center of the bay and lay down in the hammock strung between the railing along the edges of his cockpit.

“Fifty million dollars,” he said to himself, still amazed at the amount, as the seagulls circled overhead and the sun crept out from behind the clouds. “Not worth it by a long shot.”

Write Club, October Boot Camp, 9 October

2010-10-10T23:25:00.004-04:00

The Write Club at UVA has this thing called October Boot Camp where the officers send out daily writing challenges to get people prepared for NaNoWriMo. I probably won't do NaNoWriMo this year, but I'm going to try some of the writing prompts anyway. Here's yesterday's, which I did today as I didn't notice today's e-mail until just now.

Prompt: “Write a fable, containing either a traditional moral or a new one you think people should know.”

The clouds that night ensured perfect darkness as I limped along the path. I didn't need light to know my way. I'd walked the route enough times before.

I sniffed the ground as I went. That smell, that rancid stench, was there, and I knew that he had come this way. When, I wasn't sure. Maybe a half-hour before. Maybe two days. Maybe a week. More recently than that and I would've caught a rustle or a crunch of his passage through the wood; any longer back and the stench would be gone. Even foul smells fade with enough time. Even his, somehow.

I froze. I wasn't alone. There was a noise in the black ahead, a faint beating of a frail heart.

“Peter?” a small voice from the darkness ahead asked. “Please be Peter.”

I growled. “Not right now, Tomas. I'm busy.”

“Peter! Excellent.”

I heard the hare's heartbeat slow, and then heard the crunch as he crept forward. I thought about lunging forward, feasting, eating Tomas, but I resisted that urge. I wasn't hungry. Not hungry enough to eat a friend, anyway.

“I'm in a bit of a hurry.” I kept walking.

The hare leapt aside so I wouldn't step on him, but as soon as I was besides him he hopped up onto my back. I stopped.

“No.”

“Come on, Peter. Is it really that hard to carry me?”

“You've got a lot of nerve, hare.” I started limping forward again, my paws following the path without conscious direction. “You'd better hope I don't want a bite to eat.”

“You wouldn't eat a friend, would you?”

“Depends on how hungry I get.”

“I just need a ride for a little ways, and lord knows you're faster than I am by leaps and bounds.”

“Not when I've got a parasite clinging to my fur like a three-pound bur.” I quickened my pace, running along the trail. I shouldn't have stopped to chat. I didn't have the time, but Tomas was a friend. Well, a rodent that could get this close and not instantly get eaten. Perhaps not a friend but as close as he could ever get.

He hung on better than I expected, and he was still a thorn in my side as the clouds and morning broke together. I stopped in a clearing to lap up a few blades worth of dew. The grass cut my tongue but I didn't care. Wounds heal, and I've had far worse and I'm still here.

“If I hop down will you let me back up?” Tomas asked as I drank.

“No,” I told him. “Why do you want a ride, anyway? You don't need to get anywhere in a hurry.”

I'd had enough and I started back down the trail.

“I need to win a race.”

“And you don't consider this cheating?”

“I never heard any rules against it.”

I didn't respond. I was distracted. I lowered my nose to the ground again, inhaling the dirt's captured odors. The stench was here, and stronger. I was closing the gap.

I sped up, running faster along the daw-dampened path. There was maybe a mile left, at most two, separating me from my prey, but the route had turned uphill. My paw hurt at each step, the bones creaking and shifting around the two that had cracked. I couldn't stop. I was close. I could smell the hair, smell the hooves, smell the pride. If I weren't running I could've heard it up the trail, galloping along. I was almost there. My face twisted in pain and anger.

“What's wrong?” Tomas asked.

“Quiet, hare,” I hissed. “You'll be heard.”

“Heard by what?”

“Quiet.”

Tomas stayed silent as I ran on, bounding through the loose trees up the steepening slope. A glimpse of white flashed in the distance, and I snarled. Close.

Clouds once again rolled overhead, cutting the light, but it was still daytime and bright enough to see. A faint rain started falling, a drop here and there. The mud my paws kicked up slicked my fur.

Tomas's grip on my back loosened, and I felt him start to bounce around. I would've warned him not to make me break my stride, but a stray word here could've been enough to do that. I was focused, on my paw, on the trail, on the beast ahead, and I didn't have room to worry about Tomas.

The hill flattened and the forest broke before us, opening a clearing looking down to the field and the river below. I stopped just before the trees did.

He stood not a hundred yards away, his mane glowing in even just the light through the clouds. His hooves shone silver, untouched by the mud. His horn was no color, no single one, but all of them, an iridescent needle tickling the grass as he ate. I barely breathed, for fear of him hearing.

“Why did we stop?”

I snapped my head around and latched my teeth onto the hare hanging from my back. Not now. He wasn't going to ruin it all. A weak gasp escaped from Tomas's throat before I flung him to the ground, a crumpled mass of fur in the mud.

I looked back to the clearing. The unicorn was still standing there, but its gaze had shifted towards me. I stayed still, nothing but the blood in my veins moving as I watched the beast's eyes try to meet my own. He had heard Tomas, or perhaps my bite, or maybe just caught a glimpse of the body falling to the ground. Whatever had captured his attention was over now, and he turned back to the grass.

I crept forward, moving slow through the tall stalks. I had hunted ceaselessly for years, through every hell this forest had to offer, but now, I was here. This prey would be mine.

HDR photographs

2010-09-13T14:48:00.001-04:00

This fall's schedule

2010-08-29T15:37:00.004-04:00

So, after way too much shuffling and shifting, this is what I'll be doing this semester:

CS 3330 - Computer architectures
Basically, how software and hardware interact.

CS 4240 - Principles of Software Design
How to make big programs.

CS 4501 - Computational Photography
A photography class with an added focus on using computers to do stuff.

PHYS 5630 - Computational Physics 1
How to use computers to do physics stuff.

Additionally, I'll be TAing two courses, CS 2150 (Program and Data Representation) and PHYS 2419 (General Physics 2 Workshop). Basically, running a lab and doing grading.

Saturday boredom

2010-07-04T23:20:00.001-04:00

I got bored on Saturday, so I took this photograph. [Note: some parts of that process have been omitted. Anyone able to guess what they are?]

Obligatory June blog post

2010-06-30T19:11:00.004-04:00

So, I just realized I haven't posted anything in June. That's not cool of me, so here we go.
I'm currently working at JHU's Center for Talented Youth TAing cryptology. I'll be doing that for the next five and a half weeks. Fun.
In other news, my dad and I recently bought a motorcycle together. It's a 2003 Honda Nighthawk 250. It's pretty awesome.

And a couple other random photos from the month:

Spiderweb at home one morning.

Some graffiti in downtown Charlottesville after the June meetup of the Charlottesville Photography Meetup Group.

Animals

2010-05-31T21:54:00.002-04:00

The car that could save the world

2010-05-19T18:05:00.012-04:00

This is the car that could save the world:

This is Citroën's 2CV, designed shortly after World War Two to be cheap, reliable transportation. It was capable of carrying lots of luggage for farms and made to handle off-road use as easily as on-road. It wouldn't sell terribly well in its original form (at first it topped out at 40 mph, and the last model, produced in 1990, could only make it to the mid-70s), but a modern remake, with the same basic principles in mind, would be excellent.

The main things the 2CV got right:

-Designed to do just one thing, and do it damn well: The 2CV was designed to get people and light cargo from point A to point B, and it did it better than almost any other car made in its age (and, arguably, better than many newer cars). It wasn't meant to be pretty, it wasn't meant to be fast, it wasn't meant to be a luxury car, and it certainly wasn't any of these. It was transportation, pure and simple.

-Efficient use of space: The average occupants per car vary depending on time and location, but it's around 1.3 people. There are certainly situations where you need to carry more, but at least 70% of rides are transporting only 1 person. The 2CV seats 5, but the back 3 seats double easily as storage space, effectively making it easily convertible between a 5-seater family car and a 2-seater light truck. The roof is removable canvas, making it easy to carry large objects.

-Low weight: The 2CV minimized weight in many ways, from folding windows instead of windows that rolled down, to the previously mentioned canvas roof, to a front-engine, front-wheel drive system. This contributed to the car's fuel efficiency: often better than 50 miles per gallon, comparable to a Prius but without any batteries or computerized controls.

A revamp of the 2CV, or at least a car made with the same principles in mind, would very much help current concerns about pollution, as well as fuel consumption and runaway consumerism. We don't need station wagons that can top 130 miles per hour, or cars with a hundred pounds of chrome bling. We don't need SUVs that seat 7 for a mother of two living in the city. We need efficient transportation, both in terms of construction costs and fuel usage.

The availability of a car like this wouldn't alone change the world, not by any means. There are certainly issues, such as the conspicuous consumption that has led to many of the inefficiencies of current cars, that need to be addressed, but a vehicle like this, designed around being a good, solid method of transportation, would almost certainly help.

[Photograph from Wikipedia]

Edited foggy night photos

2010-05-04T01:14:00.004-04:00

I increased the contrast in certain ranges to make the tree in the back stand out more and I took out a bit of green.

I increased the contrast of the tree and played around with the colors a bit.

I darkened the foreground and brightened the range containing the ray of light and the building.

This one is an HDR composite of three photos. I've been working on trying to get HDR photos looking better, as most of my attempts thus far haven't been terribly good.

High Heels Kill

2010-05-03T22:01:00.002-04:00

A couple weeks ago I took part in the Sexual Assault Resource Agency's Walk a Mile in Her Shoes, in which men, well, walk a mile in her shoes (primarily high heels). It raises money and awareness for sexual assault resources in the Charlottesville area. It's quite hilarious to watch dozens of men parade along the Downtown Mall in high heels, and it was interesting to give it a shot myself, too. At the same time, though, it just reinforced something I've been thinking for a long time.

Now, I want to make perfectly clear that I'm not blaming any victims of criminal activity for what happened to them. No one should have to be subjected to violence or other crimes, and things like dressing scantily are not "asking for it" as some people say.

That said, it cannot be denied that there are certain actions that put people at risk. I occasionally find myself in less than favorable neighborhoods at hours I'd rather be in bed. When I have to do this, there are certain things I do to keep myself safe. I stay aware of my surroundings, I try to stay unencumbered, and I don't wear shoes that make it impossible for me to move faster than a crawl without falling on my face.

This last one, as you may have guessed from the intro paragraph, is my main point. Things like wearing high heels is inherently risky. High heels have a long history, but numerous branches (notably in Venice, Turkey, and China) began as a way of inhibiting movement, either to control women or show that a person's social status was above that requiring manual labor. They are, from a personal safety standpoint, a very bad choice.

However, they continue to thrive, as they're attractive and societal norms make them expected in certain situations. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, but it cannot be denied that they put women at risk. Not a large one, to be sure, but given how much fuss is made over preventing sexual assaults, even small improvements should be considered. Encouraging women to ditch high heels, or at least choose ones that can be kicked off in the event of an emergency, would save lives.

I think, though, that this isn't the direction society will head. Saying that not wearing high heels, or tight wrap-around skirts, or other clothing that restricts free movement, is frowned upon. The argument is that women (in a broader case, people in general) shouldn't have to restrict their lifestyles to stay safe. In an ideal world, this would be perfectly true. In the real world, though, this argument breaks down. There are people out there (not very many, but a few) who will hurt others, and if people are concerned about falling victim to those acts of violence, it's foolish for them to ignore actions they can take to stay safe, whether it's staying in groups when in unsafe areas, not getting trashed at parties, or, god forbid, wearing flats instead of heels.

What I'll be doing this summer

2010-04-22T00:34:00.003-04:00

So I'm in Clemons right now working on a take-home Symbolic Logic test. I'm also worrying about what I'll be doing this summer.

A lot of my friends are facing the issue of not being able to find a job, so I feel bad that I'm in the situation where I've got two and have to find out a way to pare that down to one. Well, I have a way. Just not one that I like.

I've got a job offer from a DC-area government contractor that I accepted (contingent on my receipt of a security clearance). However, since accepting this, my mind's been going back and forth on whether or not I actually want it, or whether I'd prefer the other pending job offer (TAing at CTY again), and at the moment I think I'd probably prefer the latter.

If I didn't mind being a dick, this would be simple. I'd call up the government contractor, tell them that I retract my acceptance, and I'd be done with it. The issue with that lies in the process of getting a security clearance, which is a very expensive process. The government would be displeased with the contractor if I were to drop out once the security clearance investigation is already underway, as it'd be a waste of money. If it were some massive contractor, that wouldn't much matter, but the contractor is on the small side and as such their reputation with the government would be hurt more than if they were massive. (It wouldn't by any means kill their reputation, but any negative mark is still a negative mark.) And as it'd be because of my withdrawal, I'd feel bad. I said I'd do the job, and I don't like going back on my word, even if the contract technically allows for it.

At the same time, though, I'm questioning whether it's really the right job for me for this summer. I know I'd enjoy CTY. I'd enjoy the work, I'd enjoy the people, and I'd enjoy that it would still leave a good portion of my summer free. Working for the contractor, I don't know. I may or may not enjoy the work. It's computer programming, which I enjoy, but I've never had to do it full-time for months. The people, I have no idea what they'll be like. I wouldn't have as much time free (only a couple weeks at the beginning and end), but it pays on the order of three or four times better than CTY.

So, the bottom line is, I don't know what I'll be doing this summer. If I get a security clearance I'll probably be working for the government contractor, but there's a definite part of me hoping that I don't get the clearance. I know it's a rare thing for me, hoping against both a valuable asset and a chance to try something new, but the expected value is, in my mind, in favor of CTY. There's also the issue that I may very well need to let CTY know whether or not I'll be back before I know whether the security clearance was granted.

CliffsNotes condensed version: If I get a security clearance, I'll be programming for a government contractor. If I don't, I'll either be TAing Crypto at CTY Lancaster, or I'll be unemployed.

'Tis a sad day for cyclists

2010-04-20T10:55:00.004-04:00

A biker was killed yesterday biking on West Main. He was a math graduate student, and although I didn't personally know him I have friends who did.

I've heard a lot since then about people blaming the driver, blaming the cyclist, and also generally just bitching about driver/cyclists/pedestrians (generally whichever group or groups the complainer themself doesn't fall into). I don't know the specifics of this accident, but I know it was what's generally called a "right hook" (biker passing a car on the right when the car turns to the right), and I myself have been in that very type of accident on West Main.

In my case, I was passing a car on the right when it made an unsignaled right turn. Whose fault is that? It's not entirely clear. By Virginia state law, cyclists are allowed to pass on the left or right when the conditions are safe. If a driver doesn't signal a turn, can it be considered safe to pass them? If people drive safely, yes. However, that's not realistic. There will always be some drivers (and cyclists, and pedestrians) who behave in an unsafe manner, and regardless of which group you usually fall into, you have to realize that the responsibility of keeping roads safe is held by all.

Drivers, stop for pedestrians in crosswalks, signal turns well in advance (especially when there are bikers on the road), and generally be aware of pedestrians/cyclists in the area. Cyclists, also stop for pedestrians in crosswalks, follow the rules of the road (especially with regards to red lights and stoplights), and don't automatically assume drivers see you or are driving legally. Pedestrians, use crosswalks if there are any cars in the area, be mindful of cyclists even when cars are absent, and for heaven's sake, if the red sign says don't cross, don't cross.

Edited photos

2010-04-16T02:47:00.002-04:00

Fish

2010-04-16T01:23:00.002-04:00

The Dell and Brown

2010-04-16T01:21:00.001-04:00

Flowers by the Dell

2010-04-16T01:20:00.000-04:00

New Desktop Background

2010-03-30T14:03:00.002-04:00

A slightly edited version of a picture from the previous post. I'm now using it as my desktop background, replacing a slightly edited version of the tree in the field.

Photomagraphs

2010-03-30T09:47:00.003-04:00

I was wandering around yesterday evening and I stopped by the cemetery to take a few pictures. Here are two that turned out okay.

Goat on a roof

2010-03-04T17:59:00.000-05:00

It's a goat...

...on a roof.

Black and White Film

2010-03-02T22:08:00.002-05:00

My election predictions

2010-02-28T20:00:00.000-05:00

First, an overview of the candidates in the race for Student Council President:

Colin Hood: current StudCo Vice President of Organizations.
Endorsed by: University Democrats, the Cavalier Daily, QUAA, Brothers United Celebrating Knowledge and Success, Catholic Student Ministry, Transfer Student Society, Inter-Fraternity Council/Inter-Sorority Council, Minority Rights Coalition, PURSUIT Conference

Dan Morrison: Second Year Class President.
Endorsed by: Habitat for Humanity, Campaign to Save Honor

Steve Norum: Me. Endorsed by: Swashbuckling Club, Campaign to Save Honor

My predictions:
Turnout will be around 6,500 students, roughly the same as last year. The voting uses a ranked ballot and an instant runoff system. Thus, even if your first pick comes in last, your vote is still heard between the other two candidates. Ignoring Arrow's Paradox, it's a pretty good system of voting.
As for the actual votes, it'll be a landslide. I'll get knocked out after the first round, as the totals will be roughly 1000 or a bit fewer for myself, 2000 for Dan Morrison, and 3500 for Colin Hood. Following my elimination, it'll become about 4000 to 2500 in favor of Colin. The number and reputation of his endorsements will be a big help, in addition to the fact that he's far more experienced with Student Council than Dan. Dan's platform is very heavy on things along the lines of "make Student Council work better for you." It's a good idea, for sure, but people want to see actual plans, which he has but for whatever reason hasn't publicized. Colin has actual plans, good plans, and students will realize this. In addition, during the run-up to the week of elections, Colin's been campaigning much more strongly than Dan.

Personally, I cast my vote for myself, although if I had been a stronger presence in the election and it had looked close I'd have voted for Colin. I think out of the three candidates he'll make by far the best overall Student Council President, and even if I think he won't much address issues I consider important (working with Student Financial Services, restoring privileges that have been taken away from Echols Scholars lately, and curbing certain showy but misguided Student Council initiatives), he'll do more to help the general student body than Dan would (largely due to greater experience, not because of any flaw of Dan's).

Picture of the day, 14 February

2010-02-14T22:49:00.002-05:00

Picture of the day, 13 February

2010-02-13T22:47:00.001-05:00

Picture of the day, 12 February

2010-02-12T22:46:00.000-05:00

Picture of the day, 11 February

2010-02-11T22:44:00.001-05:00

Unfortunately a bit out of focus.

Picture of the day, 10 February

2010-02-10T22:41:00.000-05:00

Picture of the day, 9 February

2010-02-09T22:39:00.000-05:00

Icicles on the steps outside Tucker.

Picture of the day, 8 February

2010-02-08T22:36:00.000-05:00

Not a very good picture, but the best of the day.

Photos of the days...

2010-02-08T16:14:00.000-05:00

...will be posted once UVA fixes their internet to faster-than-dialup speeds. February 6 has no photograph, but apart from that I've kept up the streak.

Picture of the day, 7 February

2010-02-07T21:48:00.000-05:00

Stereotypical Rotunda shot.

Picture of the day, 5 February

2010-02-05T21:47:00.000-05:00

Snow.

Picture of the day, 4 February

2010-02-04T21:46:00.000-05:00

The covered area outside Davis.

Picture of the day, 3 February

2010-02-03T21:45:00.000-05:00

Petition to get on the Student Council ballot.

Picture of the day, 2 February

2010-02-02T21:44:00.000-05:00

Photo of photos from Vietnam and Cambodia.

Picture of the day, 1 February

2010-02-01T21:37:00.000-05:00

The gavel of APO.

Picture of the day

2010-01-31T16:35:00.002-05:00

I'm going to try to post (at least) one picture a day for a while (which might end up being take at least one photo a day and then backdate the posts, but you get the idea). Hopefully it'll continue more than a day or two, but no promises.

So, today, Pikachu and cell phone on a hat at the lunch table. (Not from today, but the shoe photo in the other post was, so if you want to be picky, count that. This is more of an example of the randomness that will likely dominate these posts as I look for something new to photograph each day.)

Walk in the (new) snow

2010-01-31T16:11:00.003-05:00

Walk in the snow, part 2

2010-01-02T20:46:00.001-05:00

Requiem for a deer

2010-01-02T20:12:00.000-05:00

Some of the images in here might be disturbing to some, so if you're affected by pictures of animals post-encountering hunters, you might want to stop reading.

Walk in the snow, part 1

2010-01-02T19:41:00.001-05:00

New Year's Resolutions, 2009 and 2010

2010-01-02T17:54:00.000-05:00

As I'm sure every other blogger will also be doing (or has already done), I thought I'd write a post about my new year's resolutions. First, the ones from last year:

1) get the bus legal
Result: failed
The state now recognizes me as the legal owner of the bus, and it runs, but it's not yet street legal as it still needs to pass inspection.
2) finish the hovercraft
Result: failed
Never really did anything with this one. My enthusiasm died.
3) lose weight
Result: failed
I made a bit of progress during the first two months, but I stalled while abroad and then gained weight for the rest of the year to end up a little bit higher than I started
4) eat pie
Result: Success!
I ate pie. It was delicious.
5) write
Result: success
I wrote. Not as much as I'd have liked to, but I wrote.
6) get a working computer
Result: success
I got a working MacBook Pro and a working netbook. The netbook was then stolen, which still left me up one working computer from the beginning of the year.
7) bike 500 miles over the course of the year
Result: failed
I biked a few hundred miles (I don't have the odometer with me, but I think at least 200) but not the target 500.
8) run 10 miles at once
Result: failed
I didn't do much running, and what I did was always just a couple miles at most.
9) make a novel projectile launcher
Result: failed
I never got around to this.
10) be a better person
Result: unknown
I'm hardly the right person to judge this one.

Now, for this upcoming year:

1) lose weight
Let's give this one another shot.
2) eat pie
I need at least one I can guarantee a success. (And I have in fact already accomplished this one!)
3) write
Writing won't be hard, writing well/a lot will be.
4) build stuff
Always a good thing to aspire to do.
5) climb stuff
Something I want to get more into, so I may as well make it a resolution.
6) get the bus legal
Let's give this one another shot, too.
7) bike
Note the lack of quantitative evaluation. Shouldn't be too hard.
8) run
See the explanation for #7.
9) test in karate
I'm a second degree black belt in Myo Sim Kendo and the president of the Myo Sim Karate and Self-Defense club at UVA but still just a white belt in Myo Sim Karate. That should probably change.
10) be a better person
I can always use improvement in this area.

Winter break thus far

2009-12-25T11:49:00.006-05:00

I know I'm a bit late on the snow photo front, as everyone else put theirs up last weekend, but better late than never. I'll have an actual words post before too long, but for now, pictures of things.

The snow structure that a few of us in Brown (led by my roommate, pictured) constructed on Friday night as the snow was still falling. It was going to be bigger but we called it quits around 3 am.

Main Street on Saturday afternoon as I walked home.

Two dogs in the snow on the Downtown Mall Saturday.

Me, in my traveling gear.

A tree in a field.

The tree again.

A sprig of grass through the 20-ish inches of snow.

The tree again. I like this tree.

The tree, more artistic-like.

The road into my subdivision.

The house.

Snow on the roof.

My gingerbread house, evil side. The other side is rather normal and unassuming.

Pedobear. In cookie form. I'm rather pleased with how it came out.

A tunnel through a mound of snow. 'Twas mad fun to dig.

Myself, jumping off of said mound of snow.

GIMP experimentation

2009-12-05T17:00:00.001-05:00

Film - Random

2009-12-05T16:54:00.002-05:00

Film - Kendo

2009-12-05T16:47:00.007-05:00

Column of fire! (or possibly just the end of the roll)

Film - around Brown

2009-12-05T16:14:00.005-05:00

Band (and perhaps a football game, too)

2009-11-17T22:54:00.002-05:00

Photographs

2009-11-17T22:54:00.001-05:00

A guy downtown.

Then, new weird filter:

Hawk vs. Squirrel

2009-11-17T22:51:00.004-05:00

Film photographs, black and white edition

2009-11-06T17:01:00.004-05:00

Film photogtaphs, color edition

2009-11-06T16:54:00.004-05:00

Glass

2009-11-06T16:39:00.005-05:00

I didn't do this to the door, but I'm certainly not sad about the photographs that resulted from it.

Myo Sim Kendo Green Belt Rank Exam

2009-10-30T10:39:00.011-04:00

Here are some of my digital pictures from the Myo Sim Kendo rank exam last night. I took 20-ish film shots, too, and I'm taking most of them to get developed later today.

Kyle!

One-step 2.

One-step 3.

Kneeling iai 2.

Awaiting instructions.

End of an iai. Probably Standing iai 1.

Standing iai 2.

Listening to Master Shaw.

Standing iai 3.

Standing iai 3, chiburi.

Brown belt Jo Kata fun.

Sword etiquette.

Master Shaw's sword.

More sword etiquette.

And more sword etiquette.

And then right before even a little bit more sword etiquette.

Armoring up for sparring.

More armor.

Pierre vs. Barry.

Some guy watching the test from the track.

Ann vs. Ian.

Sword vs. no sword.

More sword vs. no sword.

Four brown belts, one sword each, vs. a second-dan with two.

The successful candidates in their shiny new belts!

Another success picture.

Everyone (save our intrepid photographers).

If you go out to the Lawn today, you're sure of a big surprise

2009-10-23T08:57:00.001-04:00

Doors of the Rotunda

2009-10-23T08:56:00.000-04:00

HDR photography - my first attempts

2009-10-11T02:43:00.010-04:00

Recently, I tried my hand at making HDR (High Dynamic Range) photographs. My first attempts weren't all that good, but after receiving advice on a better program to use to combine the images, I tried again and received acceptable (to my untrained eye) results. Here they are. I'm first having the three or four constituent images, followed by the HDR combination.

Newcomb Plaza:

HDR:

A tree by Brown:

HDR:

Another tree by Brown, this one facing skyward and made up of four initial shots (even though the darker two are quite similar):

HDR:

Night on the Lawn

2009-10-04T21:35:00.001-04:00

New photographerial position obtained!

2009-10-04T18:45:00.002-04:00

I'm now the official photographer for http://hoostories.blogspot.com/, a student-written blog set up by the University of Virginia department of admissions. Fun times.

Squirrelhouettes

2009-10-03T23:44:00.001-04:00

Sheepses, a goat, an alpaca, and a fly

2009-10-03T23:41:00.002-04:00

Sheepdog trials

2009-10-03T23:21:00.005-04:00

I really wish this one were in focus.

Photos

2009-09-30T09:47:00.004-04:00

A bird that was hit by a trolley. It seems to have survived all right.

A flower outside my dorm.

A pipe section out in front of Dillard.

Shoes in a tree in front of Dillard.

Another of the aforementioned shoes.

I could've sworn that was against the rules... [Edit-I have been informed that it is not. My bad.]

2009-09-25T10:16:00.002-04:00

Some Thomas Jefferson quotes

2009-09-14T17:42:00.002-04:00

Christianity neither is, nor ever was, a part of the common law.

No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms [within his own lands]. [The preceding bracketed statement is Jefferson's own, not my addition.]

I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post, which any human power can give.

I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent.

Delay is preferable to error.

To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself.

I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.

Football game, 3 (people)

2009-09-10T15:12:00.001-04:00

Football game, 2 (football)

2009-09-10T15:07:00.003-04:00

Zombies!

2009-09-10T14:05:00.004-04:00

As I mentioned in an earlier post, my ENWR 3610 teacher dislikes zombies, as well as vampires and werewolves (hereafter I'm mainly going to just say "zombie," but it applies the same to any magical creature, or even magic itself). I've never written a story with werewolves. I wrote one story with vampires (oddly enough, the one I submitted to get into ENWR, and I will never again doubt the importance of names after Denton found the title "Cigarettes, Thunder, and Beer" more interesting than "Four Minutes to Midnight" and so read the non-vampire story instead), but it was, as I said, a story with vampires, not a story about vampires. The same applies to my zombie stories. They're stories with zombies, not stories about zombies.

Perhaps I should explain that difference, as it is one that my professor, who has studied English for the past 30-odd years and has an MFA from Columbia, completely fails to grasp. A story about zombies (or vampires, or werewolves, or any other random thing) is, in my mind, a story where removing the zombies would destroy the story, whereas a story with zombies uses zombies to tell a story about something else. They might make the story more exciting or more interesting, but in the end it's a regular cow steak with zombie sprinkled on top and not a slab of zombie flesh dipped in A-1.
The flash fiction story I turned in last week was about a teenager reminiscing about his father while he gets out his family's heirloom katana, against a backdrop of moans coming from the next room. A mention is made of a spreading contagion. My interpretation of this is that the father has been zombified and the teen is going to go kill him. However, it would fit just as well with any painful, terminal disease that makes his father want to die, or for some sort of dishonour such that his father is going to commit seppuku (the time frame is never specified, it could be modern-day, it could be centuries ago).
In my previous zombie story, it's a coming-of-age tale where the son sacrifices himself so that his sister doesn't grow up without a father. He happens to sacrifice himself by distracting and fighting the zombies outside so the rest of his family can get to safety, but the story would work fine with many other disasters.
To use an example not of my own, World War Z. It's a narrative history of a zombie apocalypse. However, what it is about is human response to a disaster, especially the threat of extinction.

Stories about zombies are not inherently bad. The Zombie Survival Guide (it could be argued that is isn't really a story, but I view it as such) is about zombies, and it's hilarious. However, far too often zombies are used to make a boring idea seem fresh. That's not how it works. If you have a good idea, the prudent addition of zombies can make the story better. Look at World War Z, look at Dracula (vampires, yes, but see the disclaimer in the first sentence), look at The Graveyard Book, look at Harry Potter. They take good ideas, add magic and good writing, and the end result is excellent. If, however, you start with a cliched story and mediocre writing, adding magic, be it traditional fantasy or vampires, isn't going to make it good (for examples, see Twilight, Eragon, and about half of modern fantasy literature).

Perhaps Denton has had bad experiences with books such as Twilight and Eragon that seem to believe that cliched stories + mediocre writing + magic = awesome (note: the preceding equation is false). However, I doubt this. I believe she suffers from a different malady that commonly afflicts English professors, that of basing a story's value purely on whether it contains deep inner meanings and subtle wordplay instead of what I would rate a story on, which is, what do I get from reading it? Even if it contains mountains of meaning, if it isn't interesting, what's all that meaning worth? If it contains one, two good lessons, and is an excellent read that pulls you through like a rocket, that's what a good story is.

Football game, 1

2009-09-08T12:43:00.005-04:00

I took 581 pictures at the football game, and although I'll only be uploading a small subset of those, that's still a lot of pictures. I'll try to post them in similar-themed groups. This one is "sky".

Yay for 12,800 ISO.

Classes, and a few random photos

2009-09-05T11:16:00.003-04:00

So, the classes I'm taking this semester, in order of when I have them during the week:

CS 2330: Digital Logic Design: Easy. Boolean logic. Would be fun if it weren't the seventeenth time I've learned it.

CS 2150: Program and Data Representation: C++. C++. A bit more C++. And then perhaps a dash of C++ on the side for good measure.

CS 3102: Theory of Computation: Set theory and finite automata. Complex but slow-moving.

MATH 3100: Introduction to Mathematical Probability: Easy. Stuff I taught last summer.

ENWR 3610: Intermediate Fiction Writing: I have more to say about this than the others...
So, first assignment, flash fiction story. I write mine, the class reads it, and so on. Two (out of fourteen other students and the teacher) notice that it could be interpreted to be about zombies. Despite not realizing this on her own, my teacher starts repeating over and over that I should get rid of the zombies. The zombies that she didn't even see. Yeah. No.
And, after looking over the other flash fiction stories, out of fifteen (including my own), seven are about relationships that are either over, and the story is a reminiscence, or about a relationship the main character wants to happen, and one is about romantic relationships but in a different way. This is what happens when you have a class of 11 girls and only 4 guys. (My story was about a relationship, admittedly, but it was the father-son relationship between a kid and the zombified dad he's about to kill.)

And, for your viewing pleasure, a few random photos completely unrelated to the above post.

The lamps by the Amphitheatre, that is, me wasting time before ENWR.

Me at lunch. (Yes, I do plan on resuming and updating Daily Steves at some point.)

The remains of the aforementioned lunch.

Recent Photomajigs

2009-08-27T16:52:00.002-04:00

I also have a video of this showing that the cicada getting eaten is still, in fact, quite alive. It's rather disturbing.